Just because we’ve decided to remove an issue from politics doesn’t mean the politics is removed from the issue:
To her opponents, Falkner is more interested in doing the government’s bidding than protecting the commission’s independence. They point out that the Liberal Democrat peer was appointed to the job by Liz Truss, and claim that she always had an agenda: to make the EHRC more pliant to the Conservative stance on trans rights.
“The EHRC is not independent but we have always tried to remain impartial,” said one staff member who left over Falkner’s leadership. “But when Kishwer [Baroness Falkner] started, she kept referring to Liz Truss . . . as her boss. It was embarrassing and staff had to tell her not to, especially in front of other human rights organisations.”
Another said: “This is just a continuation of the problem of having a supposed independent organisation whose board is appointed by the government.”
The specific issue is, obviously enough, the definition of male and female and therefore whether it is possible to change from one to the other. We’ve all agreed that gender is a culturally defined variable, but sex? Well, that’s a political question, an intensely political one. And that we’ve shovelled it off into this independent body hasn’t removed the politics from it. It’s just made the politics play out in staff complaints, leaks to the press, general smoke filled backrooms stuff.
Instead of where democratic politics should be played out, at the ballot box. This being the entire point of the whole game, democracy is the only way anyone’s come up with of making these grand decisions without bloodshed.
Note what we’re not arguing here, for one or another answer to the question. Rather, for the system that must be employed to try to reach one. On such things it’s the demos that gets to have its say.
Other examples abound. We’re told that government must not be able to appoint the BBC chair. But the licence fee is a tax (yes, that’s the legal position, G Brown said so) and taxes and the spending of them get determined by that demos. There’s this most recent fuss that apparently we should pass power over pandemics up to the unelected - and unelectable (take that either way you wish) - World Health Organisation. We’d argue very strongly indeed that anyone with the power to shut down society must be forced to face the public even if retrospectively.
Or the Climate Change Commission. That climate change might well have passed beyond being a political point but what to do about it, how to do it, are still intensely political questions. As Just Stop Oil prove on multiple roadways each week. Therefore the decision-making must not be shunted off to the backrooms to be run by Lord Deben, but be decided by that ballot box.
Partly because, as above, that democracy, that actual political sphere, is the only way that anyone’s worked out to make such decisions without riotous turmoil. But rather more importantly, unless the decision made has the support of the majority then the majority simply won’t obey the rules then laid down. Without democracy deciding things the demos won’t obey the decisions. We’d become Somalia, or Italy without the weather.
This does lead to a slightly odd conclusion. We here at the ASI are insistent that vast areas of life have nothing to do with politics, democracy, the will of the majority and are best dealt with by keeping the PPE graduates well away from them. Which we stand by of course - it’s just that we also agree that there are limited areas of life where a political decision must be made. Which must then be made by that majoritarian politics, not by cabals in backrooms.
Abolish the administrative state and bring back politics with meaning.
Footnote. On the subject of the CCC we note their front page:
Net Zero offers real ‘levelling up’, but Government must get behind green jobs
The shift to Net Zero is already underway, with the creation of around 250,000 new jobs in the transition so far, but policy is now required to maximise the employment benefit of Net Zero and manage the risks.
As we, the economically educated Illuminati, know, jobs are a cost. They’re a cost of getting something done, not a benefit of having done the thing. So here is the CCC not just applauding the idea that we have a quarter million more costs involved with saving Gaia they’re insisting that we must all be made poorer yet again by doing this ever harder to ourselves. Perhaps we should just pray that the NHS will restock on anti-psychotics real soon now.