The Union and Gender politics collide
The News Agents
Global
4.1 • 5.4K Ratings
🗓️ 17 January 2023
⏱️ 33 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Two of the big conflicts which define British politics- the culture war and the war for the Union, have fused together.
The Scottish government's controversial Gender Recognition Bill, which would make it easier for people to legally change their gender and hailed by some as a great advance for trans rights, has been blocked, vetoed by the UK government.
UK ministers claim it would impact UK wide equalities legislation. In this episode, Lewis takes you through both the substance of the issue at hand but also how it is just the latest staging post on a constitutional clash of wills between Westminster and Holyrood, and how both issues, already fraught and volatile, are becoming interwoven making both all the more unstable still.
Socials: Georgia Foxwell
Video: Will Gibson-Smith
Planning: Alex Barnett
Production: Gabriel Radus
Editor: Tom Hughes
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Newsagents podcast is brought to you by HSBC UK, opening up a world of opportunity. |
| 0:09.2 | This is a global player original podcast. |
| 0:12.8 | This is an incredibly serious moment. |
| 0:15.0 | Voting this legislation is an unprecedented attack on the Scottish Parliament, |
| 0:19.9 | which passed the gender recognition reform |
| 0:22.4 | bill 86 to 39, including MSPs from every single party. Gender recognition is a devolved |
| 0:31.0 | policy area. I welcome the government's invoking of Section 35 in this case, as the bill clearly |
| 0:37.1 | conflicts with the Equality |
| 0:38.9 | Act and would have repercussions for women across the UK. |
| 0:45.4 | This is the single biggest attack on Scottish devolution and Scottish democracy since the |
| 0:50.4 | establishment of the Scottish Parliament in 1999. |
| 0:53.0 | A move to strike down a piece of legislation |
| 0:56.0 | which is supported by every single party in the Parliament |
| 1:00.0 | is as provocative as it is anti-democratic. |
| 1:03.0 | The SNP went to court to argue that sex was a legal construct, |
| 1:08.0 | not a biological construct, and therefore has landed us in this position |
| 1:11.5 | and they are trading on people's rights. It's outrageous. Can he tell me, in the absence of the UK |
| 1:17.1 | doing anything whatsoever about improving trans rights, why he's standing in the way of the Scottish |
| 1:22.2 | government making progress? That is the sound of two defining political issues of our age, fusing, intersecting, colliding, |
| 1:32.8 | crashing on the floor of the House of Commons this afternoon. The culture war, of which one |
| 1:38.4 | question, one increasingly apparently pivotal element looming ever larger, the battle for trans rights, or depending on |
| 1:45.9 | your point of view, women's rights, a fissure which has come to divide right and left and left and left |
... |
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