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Chapter 1: What is Kemi Badenoch's stance on the Equality Act?
This is The Guardian. This is not a left or right wing problem. It is a common sense problem. We are going to overhaul the act, starting by removing this duty.
What's quite shocking really is that she links this duty to major crime and political scandals. People are now saying diversity in its entirety, it's wrong. The Overton window has shifted so far to the right that Aidan Ock is a moderate on this question.
From The Guardian's Today In Focus, this is The Latest. I'm Nosheen Iqbal. Amna Modin, you are community affairs correspondent for The Guardian, and we're here today to talk about what potentially looks like a paradox on the face of it. The country's first black female leader of a major political party calling for a total overhaul of equality rules.
Amna, could you have a crack at explaining Kemi Beydonk's position on the public sector equality duty and essentially what is it, first of all?
This duty is a legal obligation for public bodies, so that's hospitals, police officers, teachers, that requires them to have a think before they act and to make sure that they are thinking about equality law. So, for example, if a local council wants to shut down a local library, they need to have a think about the impact that could have
on local community, on children, on people from lower income backgrounds, on disabled people. So for example, if you close down that local library and in that area there are quite a lot of disabled people, can they access the next nearby library?
If the answer to that is no, they have to ensure that there's public transport available to them to go to that next library, or there's a mobile library, or they rethink the decision to close down that library. And so why does Badenoch say that she wants to abolish this duty? Because it sounds quite sensible on the face of it. So she says what was a sensible safeguard has now gone too far.
She links a lot of that to Black Lives Matter and what she describes as identity politics. But this is a misreading, perhaps a willful misreading, of equality law. This duty has existed since the Stephen Lawrence murder and the inquiry that has followed. Again, it just tells public bodies, why don't you have a think about what impact your actions could go on to have?
But she argues that this has become a vehicle for grievance politics, for identity politics, that it's pushing EDI, diversity initiatives. And it means that public bodies are no longer focused on their core responsibilities.
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Chapter 2: How does the public sector equality duty affect local decisions?
You know, I do think that anger is real from my reporting from going to different parts of this country. At the same time, Britain is a remarkably diverse country and nearly the majority of the people that live here are fine with living with people that are different from them. What we're really seeing from the right is two arguments coming.
One, and I think this is where Badenoch's camp sits, asks how do institutions respond to diversity? She's suggesting that they've been doing it wrong since BLM or perhaps since the Stephen Lawrence inquiry, that DEI or EDI or identity politics has gone too far and that actually some of these policies are discriminating against white Britons. But there's an argument to the right of her.
And it's quite scary, actually, that, you know, people are now saying diversity in its entirety. It's wrong. We need mass deportation of people who've been here for several generations. We need mass deportations of people here who are migrants who are legally here. The Overton window has shifted so far to the right that Badenoch is a moderate on this question.
Stop it. No. I mean, arguably, you know, she can talk about this stuff, but she's so far from achieving power that it kind of seems irrelevant to some people. Like, why are you talking about it? It's just a distraction. However, as you say, this stuff seeps into the discourse. It moves the conversation further along.
And Badenoch is there, again, without actually being prime minister, having a massive impact on policy and on the conversation that people have. And I wonder, you know, in your reporting, as you've been across the country, How reflective do you think her position actually is of where the British public sits?
I think we have to be honest that the public conversation has definitely shifted. Ideas that would have been considered fringe perhaps a decade ago, people are saying on doorstops, people are making those comments on Facebook and Stan X is a bit frantic. perhaps to the right of other social media platforms. It's its own beast, isn't it? Yeah.
But people are saying this in a way that I don't think they would have said a decade ago. When you say say this, saying racist things. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I think people are saying quite shocking racist things about people of colour in this country. They're saying quite shocking things about what equality law actually says and the impact it will have.
But I think what we have to do is ask them to be very particular about
ask them to give us examples right so if reform wants to abolish the Equality Act we have to ask them do you are you saying that if a woman has been fired because she is pregnant that is okay in a reform country like we should really begin to ask those questions because the other thing that really came out from speaking to experts is how fuzzy a lot of what the right wants to happen to the Equality Act is
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