Labour’s UK and Scottish leadership have moved to defuse conflicts over their approach to Holyrood’s gender recognition bill and Westminster government moves to block it, as individual MSPs call for Westminster colleagues to respect Holyrood’s work on transgender rights reform.
A court battle is now looming over Westminster’s decision to block the law passed by the Scottish parliament at the end of last year to introduce a self-declaration system for people who want to change gender.
On Wednesday morning, the Scottish Labour leader, Anas Sarwar, who has faced criticism for his silence on the constitutional row until now, insisted there was no disagreement with UK leader Keir Starmer.
Starmer said on Monday that 16-year-olds should not legally be able to change gender, putting him at odds with the Scottish colleagues, the majority of whom backed the 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 UK party.”
He told Radio Clyde: “But where there is agreement is around protection of devolution, around reform, around protection of single-sex spaces and removing the inhumanities of the process of obtaining a GRC.”
The party’s only Scottish MP, Ian Murray, led Labour’s response to Scottish secretary Alister Jack’s decision to make a section 35 order to prevent the bill going for royal assent on Monday and Tuesday.
The shadow Scottish secretary likewise insisted on Wednesday: “There’s little difference between the two parts of the Labour party on this.”
Meanwhile, senior UK party figures denied that Keir Starmer was attempting to play into the culture wars by disagreeing with lowering the age individuals can get gender recognition certificates to 16, insisting they agree that gender law reform has to be modernised.
UK Labour has tried to step back from the row, suggesting that it wants to take a “sober” and “evidence-based” approach and remember the issue is, at its heart, about the rights of trans people.
But individual MSPs criticised Starmer’s intervention, suggested that UK colleagues should pay more attention to their experience having spent the past year working on detail on the bill.
Prominent backbencher Monica Lennon suggested Starmer was poorly briefed, saying he would do “better to talk to people in Scottish Labour who were in the debate and doing the work in the Scottish parliament”.
Employment spokesperson Paul Sweeney accepted that there were “tensions” within Labour over transgender rights but added: “The fundamental principle needs to be that MSPs who worked on the bill, scrutinised it line by line and voted for it by a large majority are best placed to talk to the detail and decide the final position. That doesn’t appear to have been the case so far.”
A number of Labour MPs expressed their own concerns about the Holyrood bill in the Commons on Tuesday, an indication of long-running divisions, in particular among Labour women. In Holyrood, two Labour MSPs, who were whipped to vote in favour of the bill, rebelled at December’s final vote, while others were allowed to be absent.
Sweeney urged MSPs of all parties to unite and “be unequivocal that decisions made in our parliament, and that are clearly within competence, should be respected and not interfered with”.
Lennon also urged her party’s Holyrood leadership to address the “misinformation and dangerous tropes” she said were apparent in the UK government’s blocking of the gender bill.
“Leadership is important at a time when there’s a lot of dangerous misinformation out there. When a minority group is being demonised, Scottish Labour should be calling it out.”
Sarwar called for the UK government to instruct the Equality and Human Rights Commission to issue guidance on contentious aspects of the bill that both governments could then consider, adding that a Scottish Labour amendment ensured that “nothing in the bill supersedes the Equality Act”.
He said that using section 35 was “the wrong approach”, as a UK Labour spokesperson described the decision as unprecedented, and demanded that the UK government release its legal advice to understand the basis on which it was taken.
“It’s clearly an unprecedented decision and we want to see the basis on which it was made.”
The spokesperson added: “There is nothing in the public statements that the government has made yesterday that suggests that there is a threat to those single sex space exemptions in their advice.” This appears to be a progression from Starmer’s own comments earlier this week that he was “concerned” about the impact of the bill on the UK-wide Equality Act.
Pam Duncan-Glancy, the Scottish Labour equalities spokesperson who led on the bill at committee stage, said colleagues were “heartbroken” at the emerging constitutional row because “in the middle of all this are trans people who were planning for this change”.
She described Jack’s justification for blocking the bill as “paper thin”.
