by Andrew Doyle
The Equalities Minister’s response to criticism of Labour’s Conversion Practices Bill suggests that she is woefully out of her depth.
Is anyone else concerned about Bridget Phillipson? As the Minister for Women and Equalities, and therefore the cabinet minister most responsible for the government’s proposed Conversion Practices Bill, she ought to welcome questions and criticism while this controversial legislation is still in its draft stage. Yet her approach to being challenged resembles a keyboard activist on Bluesky, ranting that everyone who disagrees with her is a bigot. Is this really the standard of politicians that our country is producing?
The ostensible purpose of the Bill is to outlaw abusive practices intended to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity. But the sort of violent practices we associate with conversion therapy for homosexuals are already illegal. As for ‘gender identity’, this is not a concept that the government – or anyone else for that matter – has been able to define satisfactorily. Yet Labour wants the power to imprison citizens for up to five years if they attempt to change something whose meaning remains fundamentally unclear by means of an ‘abusive’ practice that is never defined.
[…] These are all legitimate criticisms from experts in the field. And how has Phillipson reacted? After Tory leader Kemi Badenoch warned that the legislation could ‘mean that parents start getting arrested for parenting their children’, and announced that her party would be withdrawing its support for the Bill, Phillipson responded by accusing the Conservatives of ‘chasing Reform into the gutter’. Badenoch’s party, she said, had ‘no interest in supporting LGBT+ people, no interest in calling out abuse of LGBT+ people, and no interest in a tolerant, modern Britain’.
The accusation is not only childish, it is aimed at the entirely wrong target. We know from Hannah Barnes’s research into the now-defunct Tavistock Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) that the majority of adolescents referred were same-sex attracted. One former GIDS psychologist, Matt Bristow, came to believe that the service was effectively performing ‘conversion therapy for gay kids’. Labour’s Conversion Practices Bill will enable and promote genuine gay conversion therapy, yet Phillipson is championing herself as the protector of minority rights. The irony is difficult to overstate.
See also: Why and how Christians should oppose the ‘conversion practices’ ban | Christian Concern livestream