The UK and Scottish Labor leadership have moved to calm conflicts over their approach to Holyrood’s gender recognition bill and the Westminster government is moving to block it as individual MSPs call on Westminster peers to respect Holyrood’s work on transgender rights reform.
A legal battle is now looming over Westminster’s decision to block legislation passed by the Scottish Parliament late last year to introduce a self-declaration system for people who want to change their gender.
On Wednesday morning, Scottish Labor leader Anas Sarwar, who has been criticized for his silence on the constitutional row so far, insisted he has no differences with UK leader Keir Starmer.
Starmer said on Monday that 16-year-olds should not legally be able to change their gender, putting him at odds with Scottish colleagues, the majority of whom backed plans to extend the application process for a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC) to 16 – and 17-year-olds.
Sarwar said: “How Keir decides what the law looks like in other parts of the UK is absolutely a matter for the party in the UK.”
He told Radio Clyde: “But where there is agreement is around protecting devolution, around reform, around protecting single-sex spaces and removing inhumanities in the process of getting a GRC.”
The party’s sole Scottish MP, Ian Murray, led Labour’s response to Scottish Secretary Alastair Jack’s decision to issue a section 35 order to prevent the bill from being approved by the king on Monday and Tuesday.
The shadow Scottish secretary also insisted on Wednesday: “There is little difference between the two parts of the Labor Party on this issue.”
Meanwhile, senior party figures in the UK have denied that Keir Starmer is trying to take part in the culture wars by opposing lowering the age at which people can get gender recognition certificates to 16, insisting they agree that gender law reform needs to be modernized.
UK Labor has tried to distance itself from the row, suggesting it wants to take a “sober” and “evidence-based” approach and remember that the issue is at the heart of trans rights.
But individual MSPs criticized Starmer’s intervention and suggested UK colleagues should pay more attention to his experience after spending the last year working on the details of the bill.
Prominent backbencher Monica Lennon suggested Starmer was ill-informed, saying he would have been “better off talking to people from Scottish Labor who were in the debate and doing the work in the Scottish Parliament”.
Employment spokesman Paul Sweeney accepted there was “tension” within Labor over transgender rights, but added: “The bottom line should be that the MSPs who worked on the bill looked at it line by line and voted yes him by a large majority, are in the best position to talk to the detail and decide the final position. It doesn’t seem to have been the case so far.”
A number of Labor MPs raised their own concerns about the Holyrood bill in the House of Commons on Tuesday, an indication of long-standing divisions, particularly among Labor women. In Holyrood, two Labor MPs who had been beaten to vote in favor of the bill rebelled at the last vote in December, while others were allowed to sit out.
Sweeney called on MSPs from all parties to come together and “be unequivocal that decisions taken in our Parliament which are clearly within the remit should be respected and not interfered with”.
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Lennon also called on her party’s leadership at Holyrood to tackle the “misinformation and dangerous tropes” she said were evident in the UK government’s blocking of the gender equality bill.
“Leadership is important at a time when there is a lot of dangerous misinformation. When a minority group is demonised, Scottish Labor must call it out.”
Sarwar called on the UK government to instruct the Equality and Human Rights Commission to issue guidance on controversial aspects of the bill that both governments could then consider, adding that a Scottish Labor amendment ensured that “nothing in the bill supersedes the Equality Act’.
He said using section 35 was “the wrong approach” as a UK Labor spokesman described the decision as unprecedented and demanded the UK government publish its legal advice to understand the basis on which it was taken.
“This is clearly an unprecedented decision and we want to see the basis on which it was made.”
The spokesman added: “There is nothing in the public statements the Government made yesterday to suggest there is a threat to these single-sex space exemptions in their councils.” This appears to be a progression from Starmer’s own comments earlier this week, that he was “concerned” about the bill’s impact on the Equality Act in the UK.
Pam Duncan-Glancy, spokesperson for Scottish Employment Equality, which led the bill at committee stage, said peers were “heartbroken” by the emerging constitutional row because “in the middle of it all are trans people who are planning this change”.
She described Jack’s rationale for blocking the bill as “paper thin.”
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