UK Politics 2023

[Jubal]

Hopefully containing fewer Prime Ministers than 2022's trio.

The focus of politics has rather moved out of Westminster for a winter of discontent, we start the new year with Lots of Strikes (no really, lots), and the unions at loggerheads with a Conservative government that's very unwilling to compromise. Rishi Sunak hasn't revived Conservative fortunes, and Keir Starmer is still sitting on an enormous polling lead on the basis that he's not Those Bastards. The Lib Dems are sitting rather statically on ten percent ish or a bit less, the Greens and hard-right Reform on a few points each, the SNP sabre-rattling about independence... it all feels rather strange, with a pretty lame duck government, an opposition touting very few ideas, and a desperately exhausted and angry country not entirely sure where to turn.



Someone recently linked me to this, noting the Lib Dems' soft-pedalling of their drug policy, which is a microcosm of where the party is generally under Ed Davey. Very much going for the softly approach to avoid upsetting anyone and hoping enough people will be put off the Tories to win us some seats.
https://volteface.me/missing-the-liberal-democrats/

The bad news for the Lib Dems is that there have been some reports that the Tories are going to give up on the northern seats they're fighting with Labour altogether, effectively conceding the election, in favour of a really hard push to keep affluent southern voters onside rather than risk losing on both fronts. That could really screw over the Ed Davey strategy, given the resources Sunak would have for trying to hold those seats.



Anyway, the real story is the cost of living. Things are pretty desperate in the UK right now, and it's hard to see much change happening this year as the Conservatives try to hang on as best they can (I doubt they'll call an early election to get the pain over with: they'll just be hoping the economy revives a bit and they can take credit next year).

[dubsartur]

I have seen a claim on social media that the Scottish gender recognition reform bill is originally a piece of legislation which Theresa May brought out as a quick thing to do for LGBTQ+ rights before trans issues became such a culture war issue in the UK.  And that a group called Stonewall drafted the original version.  Is that correct?

I find it very hard to find clear, honest information about trans issues.

[Jubal]

Ah, did you see Sarah Brown's post that was going around on Mastodon? Yeah, Sarah knows what she's talking about, she's been very much at the front line on this stuff in a UK context (I should also add for the register of interests that we know each other).

Anyway, you're mostly right but a bit fudged on the precise details. Stonewall's report precipitated a proposal for a UK-wide reform bill under Theresa May: Stonewall didn't actually draft the legislation, but they produced the recommendation. Stonewall, for context, is the UK's biggest LGBT rights charity: they've become the focus of much ire of social conservatives lately, but really they're traditionally the more establishment side of LGBT rights campaigning. Anyway, it was in the wake of the UK-wide effort failing as the Conservatives swung authoritarian under Boris Johnson that a bill to do the same thing but only in Scotland alone started being pushed forward. Scotland is more urbanised than England and tends in consequence to lean left, and the SNP have been very keen to precipitate a stand-off over legal issues like this because it helps them make the case that Scotland can only really do what it wants if it leaves the UK.

And that brings us to where we are now, with the post-Johnson Tories trying to block Scotland from doing the reform. There will be a court challenge and it's not clear how it will go: I've seen some posts by people I wouldn't expect to be radicals or pro-Scottish independence on this suggesting that the government may lose in the Supreme Court because the bar for using a Section 35 order to block legislation is actually quite high and it's not clear that they've necessarily met it.

One pertinent question is why the Tories think this is a battle worth fighting: I don't think many people believe that Sunak and Hunt are rabidly anti-trans-rights on anything other than a political calculation level. They may be hoping to use this as a wedge issue to keep social conservatives voting for them, or to raise the prominence of the SNP in an attempt to scare English voters off the idea of a Labour-SNP coalition: I don't buy the idea that they're simply using it to try and distract from the strikes. We'll see what happens next I suppose.

[dubsartur]

Thanks!  The culture war thing does seem to engage very small but passionate groups: LGBTQ+ and trans rights organizations, feminist organizations, the radical right, and some people who spend too long on social media and take it all seriously.  And the current issue of making it easier for people to have their state-issued ID reflect their gender presentation and identity seems like a pretty estoeric one which mostly affects trans and intersex people and mostly affects their interactions with states rather than eg. sports organizations or women's organizations.  Isn't the most common use case stopping trans and intersex people being hassled by police or customs officials because their gender presentation does not match their ID (or being outed to employers because their gender presentation does not match their ID?)

[Jubal]

Yeah, the actual uses of gender recognition documentation are pretty legally limited. You can change the sex marker on your medical records, passport, and driving license without one, so it's not really a police officials issue as you don't need it for the most common forms of ID. But you do need it to change the sex markers on HMRC documentation, on your birth certificate, to have it recorded reliably properly on your death certificate, and to have marriage licenses issues per the correct gender. If that sounds bizarre as a system for what it affects, yes, it is: it's one of these things that's become totemic for the right despite being really quite bureaucratically esoteric.

Meanwhile a number of rule-breaking scandals seem to be hitting the government, and the cost of living crisis worsens.

[dubsartur]

So what are the working models in the UK of when ID should reflect biological sex and when it should reflect gender identity, gender presentation, or something else?  Making it easy to change on the birth certificate is surprising since a newborn does not have, and certainly cannot express, gender identity (although birth certificates absolutely get used for other things later in life).

[Jubal]

Birth certificates are in the harder category to change, in that you do need gender recognition documents (and you can only do it for your own: so this is adults changing their birth certificates retroactively). There's no case where you're obliged to keep your sex-assigned-at-birth (which I'll assume is what you mean by "biological sex") on documentation if you have a gender recognition certificate, at least so far as I'm aware. But since the most important documentation can be changed even without a GRC, it doesn't seem like it makes much sense to make a GRC especially hard to get. I don't think that having legal documents be reflective of gender rather than attempting to describe sex is a bad working model, though I think we should simplify it to allow legal self-certification of gender. I'm not aware of any case where knowing sex assigned at birth on a piece of paper is actually very helpful, as opposed to people making individual decisions on certain matters on a case-by-case basis.

[dubsartur]

(scratches head)

I have to say you are not helping the case that its only crazy nasty people who say that there is a movement to deny the existence or importance of biological sex!

Trans and intersex people call to mind the maxim that hard cases make bad law (ie. make sure that your policies work for most people, then see about the unusual cases)

Edit: and I was serious: what are the different models proposed for when various types of British ID should reflex sex, when they should reflect gender identity or presentation, and when they should have nothing about sex or gender at all?  What are the best arguments for them?  How do they handle the tough cases such as intersex people?

[dubsartur]

I'm not aware of any case where knowing sex assigned at birth on a piece of paper is actually very helpful, as opposed to people making individual decisions on certain matters on a case-by-case basis.

At about the same time as the current gender identity movement became famous, there was a simultaneous movement pointing out that a lot of medical science has been tested exclusively on people of the male sex, and it turns out that things like medicine or seatbelts often affect people of the female sex differently.  Women and girls are not just shorter, lighter men and boys.  (The arguments for just testing males are often hilarious, such as "women have hormone fluctuations").  In a world of mass-produced objects, accessible design has to consider sex, just like it has to consider handedness or disability. 

So when you are doing biomedical studies, its important to know the subjects' biological sex.  Even if someone identifies as nonbinary, genderfluid, agender, etc. they still belong to a class which has meaningful and substantial differences on average from the other half of humanity, and which is distinct from their identity.  Intersex people and trans people who use gender-affirming care are an edge case, I'm not sure what current best practices are (but they are much less common than people who identify as butches or softboys or nonbinary or all these amazing categories which people find helpful to understand their place within the system of social categories that is gender).

[Jubal]

I wouldn't say I deny the importance of biology at all. What I do deny is binary and simplistic thinking about that biology, because I think that is likely to hurt people who in one way or another don't fit the assumed norms of those categories. I obviously agree that assuming everyone can be approximated to a white European man is pretty awful: I don't see the argument for advocating fixing that by turning one pigeonhole into two, when we could do so much better by using our capacity to describe and model the complexity of people's realities and experiences. I don't think one can detach the sorts of concerns you raise from gender, too: the reason for poor outcomes for women medically is based on the wider oppression of women as a gender category.

I also don't think this is a case of hard cases making bad law: when it comes to issues of medical rights and identity, the law needs to cover everyone to create a reasonable measure of equality: at the very least, it needs a strong case that including the edge cases will produce actual harms to the majority, which in my view hasn't really been made here.

On your example: firstly, biomedical studies aren't in any sense a legal documentation issue, and it had been my understanding that was the focus of our discussion. Second, if you're doing biomedical studies, it is important to know a range of details about the subjects' biological sex characteristics, but I think those are things you should be asking them and if necessary verifying at the time of the study. That may be best done by using a heuristic of asking people what sex they were assigned at birth, but it may be best done by checking or asking about their chromosomes or which hormones they produce or take supplements of or their height and weight or their bone structure or their genital structure or any number of other potentially relevant features. At best, in biomedical terms, a binary sex marker is a rough heuristic that we have to use for the sake of time and cost: I don't think we should elevate it to the point where we treat it as a social class, because then we're just reinventing a new binary form of gender with all the problems that implies.

I am yet to see anyone explain how the position of "sex isn't simple, so get some actual data and do your best to cover the things you're actually studying" is a threat to accessible design.



Regarding ID models,  the answer frankly is that nobody in a serious governing position seems to have thought about it in depth, and outside those circles really the only pitches on the table are "binary sex for everything, get rid of gender wokery" (from the right and the conservative-feminists), and "maybe switch to a trinary gender system across most forms of ID" (from some liberals who care about these issues) and "remove gender and sex from all forms of ID" (which I've seen from a few gender abolitionist left types, not to be confused with gender criticals who are in the binary sex only camp). Nobody so far as I'm aware has published any comprehensive reform scheme, or proposed any differentiation between different forms of ID, and the current differences in which ID requires or reflects what are due to circumstance not intention.

[Jubal]

Nadhim Zahawi, the Conservative party chairman, has been sacked over investigations being made into his tax affairs.

[Jubal]

Okay, THIS is a big one: Nicola Sturgeon, Scottish FM since 2014 and their leader through almost all their most successful elections ever, is stepping down:

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-64647907

I think Sturgeon going is a political resignation that does matter: she's managed to hold the SNP together and beat back alternative Scot-Indy parties like Alba, and has really been the face of their strategy for so many years that it's hard to imagine someone stepping into her shoes. And I don't know if the disagreements on strategy etc within the SNP will be quiet ones to resolve.

A friend with much better insight into Scottish politics than me thinks Angus Robertson is the most likely successor. 

[Jubal]

With Angus Robertson not going for the SNP job, Humza Yousaf seems to be the favourite by far. There are three candidates running: Ash Regan, a centrist running hard against the SNP's recent equalities bills on trans rights, Kate Forbes, an economic centre-leftist but with really socially conservative religious views on all LGBT rights, and Yousaf, who is the continuity candidate and seems overwhelmingly likely to win. Either Forbes or Regan winning would be a massive change for the SNP to a more conservative set of stances: elected officials have been openly suggesting that a Forbes win would split the party, and either Forbes or Regan would be overwhelmingly likely to have to pull the plug on the SNP's cooperation with the Green Party because of their social views.

Yousaf, on the other hand, is not of the calibre of Sturgeon: he's been attacked for his time as Scottish health secretary by the other candidates and opposition alike, and Alex Salmond (former SNP leader, now Alba Party leader, who has said he might rejoin an SNP run by Regan) has been attacking him for not turning up to the vote that passed same-sex marriage in Scotland a few years ago. For a mix of reasons, largely his ministerial record, he polls worse than Forbes does among the general public. It's really hard to know what this might mean for the SNP's future.



Anyway, the current grand meltdown in the UK is that half the BBC's sports programming or more is off air because the BBC decided its Match of the Day anchor, Gary Lineker, was contractually not allowed to tweet extremely sharp criticism of the government over its new anti-refugee policies (he compared them to 1930s Germany and that upset the Home Secretary). The pundits, commentators, and anchors of just about every football show the BBC has have walked out in solidarity with Lineker, even some right wingers have realised that the concept that an employer can censure a personal twitter account for a non-news presenter goes a bit far for them, and the BBC is apparently just going to run highlights with no commentary on today's MotD.

[Jubal]

Humza Yousaf is the new SNP leader, by a thin margin. The first count was 48.2% Yousaf, 40.7% Forbes, 11.1% Regan, and then the second count 52.1% Yousaf to 47.9% Forbes, according to the BBC.

That puts him in a tricky position: Forbes presumably will expect a seat at the top table with a performance that strong, but she was also running on really pivoting the SNP to a noticeably less socially and economically centre-left position and it's hard to see where Yousaf can give ground there. And she was finance minister already, so it's hard to just give her a promotion while keeping her supporters happy. He's also by all accounts somewhat less popular among the Scottish public than Forbes, and he's certainly viewed less well than Sturgeon was. He can keep the wheels on the bus right now - the Greens will stay cooperative with him which they wouldn't have done with his rivals - but the key thing in the coming weeks will be seeing whether he can keep the SNP, and with it the Independence VI, polls in the ranges the SNP have become accustomed to.

Keir Starmer has visited Scotland a number of times recently: there's a definite sense that Scottish Labour are scenting blood in the water, and they're a few points up from where they were in the polls already.

EDIT: Kate Forbes has left the Scottish government, reportedly Yousaf offered her only a significant demotion. She was apparently offered the job of Rural Affairs spokesperson, which would have rhymed oddly with the situation of Tim Farron who's essentially taken that role for the Liberal Democrats at Westminster after, like Forbes, screwing up his political leadership of a progressive party due to his rather hardline religious views.



Meanwhile in England, a report has shown that police have apparently been conducting strip-searches on children, and disproportionately non-white children at that: this comes shortly after another report that suggested the Metropolitan Police has massive racism culture problems from the grassroots officers upwards.

It also looks like Labour is poised to ban Jeremy Corbyn from standing for them as a candidate, which is a pretty rare thing for a party to do to a former leader.

[dubsartur]

Someone quipped that someone with Indian parents and someone with Pakistani parents are about to argue whether to partition the United Kingdom