Confusion on gender law shows that Northern Ireland enjoys only second class British citizenship
The Windsor Framework has already persuaded a third of companies trading between Great Britain and Northern Ireland to stop, caused difficulties for almost 80 per-cent of firms in Ulster, and imposed on the province the “most complex VAT and customs regime” in Europe. Still, the government always reassured anxious unionist politicians that its effects were strictly economic. In its Safeguarding the Union agreement with the DUP, for example, Rishi Sunak’s Conservative administration claimed that the framework applied only to trade in goods and the, “vast majority of public policy was entirely untouched by it.”
This interpretation was quickly destroyed by two court judgments, which struck down both the Immigration Act (known popularly as the Rwanda Act) and parts of the Legacy Act in Northern Ireland, on the basis that they were incompatible with EU human rights laws. According to those verdicts, Westminster (and Stormont) could no longer legislate for the province across a vast range of policy areas, if the laws clashed with Brussels’ edicts. Now, in arguably the most serious example of this constitutional reversal so far, Northern Ireland’s Equality Commission (ECNI) has suggested that the Supreme Court’s decision that sex means biological sex may not apply in Northern Ireland, thanks to the framework.
The rights of men who call themselves women could be deemed more important than the rights of actual women, if a judge takes this view of European law. The Women’s Rights Network NI expressed “grave concerns that women and girls are now left unprotected, exposed to sexual harassment and discriminated against by employers, service providers and in daily life.” Its spokeswoman, Kirsty Montgomery, claimed it left “women in NI (with) fewer rights than women in the rest of the UK.”
Last week, after a significant delay, the ECNI published a paper on the implications of the Supreme Court’s verdict in Northern Ireland but declined to give clear guidance. The organisation’s Chief Commissioner, Geraldine McGahey, nonetheless said sex may not have the same legal meaning in Northern Ireland as it has in the rest of the UK. She now wants the High Court in Belfast to rule on the effects on equality legislation of Article 2 of the Windsor Framework, which requires the government to follow EU human rights rules in NI.
This is a devastating blow to women’s rights campaigners, because many public institutions across Northern Ireland had already delayed implementing the Supreme Court’s verdict, using the ECNI’s impending advice as an excuse. At Stormont, the home of the province’s devolved government, Sinn Fein, SDLP and Alliance MLAs blocked changes to the Assembly’s toilet policy, ignoring legal advice provided to the Assembly Commission. The building even hosted a pro-trans event recently, whose organisers encouraged visitors to use whichever facilities they felt “best aligned” with their gender.
For a certain type of Irish separatist, the priority is always to exacerbate and exaggerate any differences between Northern Ireland and Great Britain
In Northern Ireland, nationalists and the supposedly constitutionally neutral Alliance Party have competed to prove their “woke” credentials. On the UK mainland, the backlash against extreme views on gender, race and sexuality caused even self-declared “progressives” to rethink their reflexive support for these causes. In contrast, those ideas came to the province relatively late, but they have a grip on politicians desperate to portray themselves as forward-thinking. The Cass Report, like the Supreme Court verdict, only caused these parties to double down.
For a certain type of Irish separatist, the priority is always to exacerbate and exaggerate any differences between Northern Ireland and Great Britain. For the woke cult of Alliance, the problem is a mixture of sanctimony and stupidity. At the Assembly’s Executive Office Committee, chaired by the party’s chief whip, Paula Bradshaw, a gender critical women’s rights group was subjected to a barrage of hostile commentary, when it tried to give evidence on trans issues.
The Free Speech Union’s director, Toby Young, later described Ms Bradshaw’s “aggressive intolerance” towards alternative views on gender as “typical of those captured by gender ideology.” He defended the TUV MLA, Timothy Gaston, a trans-sceptical member of the committee, who repeatedly clashed with the chair, as she seemingly tried to prevent him from expressing his views.
Now, thanks to the ECNI and the Windsor Framework, the gender activists at Stormont have another excuse to refuse to comply with UK law. The Northern Irish courts have already shown they are willing to interpret EU human rights diktats in the broadest possible way, in order to reject the will of parliament. There is every chance that judges will do the same, if they decide this logic can be used to depart from the Supreme Court’s verdict.
The Windsor Framework, meanwhile, not only inflicted economic harm on Northern Ireland, as a way of mollifying anti-British Irish republicans and vengeful EU bureaucrats. It also watered down the province’s place in the UK, leaving swathes of life there under the authority of Brussels. This confusion on gender law proves, again, that, in Northern Ireland, British citizenship simply no longer carries the same range of political rights and entitlements enjoyed in the rest of the country.
