Can Badenoch’s culture war win back Reform supporters? – The Latest
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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.
What's quite shocking really is that she links this duty to major crime and political scandals that we've had, such as the Manchester Arena bombing, the Nottingham attacks, Southport and grooming gangs.
So Badenoch is absolutely confident in her beliefs about, you know, what this duty leads to. But you've spoken to experts in the field, Amna. Can you tell me what their take is on Badenoch's claims and what real life impact could this rollback potentially have?
Yeah, so I spoke to equality experts, so professors and barristers who were quite sceptical of her linking with this public duty with some of the recent scandals that they've had. Many have just said that it's complete nonsense. On what impact that this could have, they said that the duty can impact disability access, maternity services, again, support for vulnerable children. But there's a reason this duty exists because it hasn't been common sense in the past. There was a requirement that told them, please stop, have a think.
an act on the common sense that she insists that everyone just has by default. Exactly. And it is curious timing because while Badenoch says that she's been working on this policy for months, she did then talk today about the Henry Novak case again and claims that police who arrested Novak were influenced by guidance saying that hate crimes should be treated as a priority. Now, we know that she's a very skilled and experienced culture warrior. She's an avowed fan of Trump's rollback of diversity equity and inclusion policies in the states how much do you think though that this political strategy will help her win back those former conservative voters who have defected to either reform or to restore baden has been really consistent on this question on racial equality on gender equality so when she was the equalities minister she was very very critical of what she described as
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