When I was a student, I was twice elected to be one of the two undergraduate representatives on my College Council. Looking back, I realise that I was rather ineffective, never fully understanding the relative importance of the various items on the agenda, nor knowing how to be persuasive in discussion, nor being able to build alliances with those academics who were sympathetic to the student viewpoint. It was, as they say, a learning experience. During this time, I thought it important to attend the monthly student union meetings, to be informed about the issues that my fellow students were discussing and aware of anything that might need to be presented to the College Council on the students’ behalf. It was at one of these meetings that I witnessed a disreputable breach of good process, that was successful in the short term, but caused sufficient reputational damage that it was soon rescinded.
The student union in the College was responsible for distributing funds to societies and clubs, generally according to their popularity, adjusted for the costs of the activity. The newly elected head of the student union was keen to reallocate money away from one of the big sports clubs, to fund other societies with which he had more sympathy. His plan had some merit, but it would be controversial. His proposed funding allocations were due to be debated at an open meeting, under item 10 of a long agenda. It would likely take an hour or so to get to this item, after various reports, updates, and a discussion about the annual college party, had been dealt with. As I headed to the meeting, I passed the College bar, where members of the under-threat sports club were gathering. They were going to drink beer first, prepare their speeches, and then show up at the meeting to vote against the proposed cut in funding.
The meeting started, sparsely attended, and the minutes from the previous month were approved. The head of the union then suggested a change to the order of the agenda: we could, he said, take item 10 now, to approve the new funding allocations, and then go back to item 2, ‘matters arising from the previous meeting’. The attendees all laughed, thinking this was a joke but the chair, persisting with his plan, invited anyone who wished to speak for or against the recommendation on club funding allocations to raise their hand. One student – clearly briefed beforehand about this ploy –spoke in favour of the redistribution of resources, after which the resolution at item 10 was passed without dissent. The multitude of sport club members who were about to lose 20% of their annual funding were still sitting in the bar, unaware that they had been disenfranchised. An hour later, when they arrived at the meeting, there was uproar when they discovered that the motion they had come to vote down had already been approved.
Under “any other business”, the captain of the sports club proposed a motion of no confidence in the head of the student union, which was passed by a show of hand. A constitutional crisis loomed.
The crisis was averted, but only after many heated exchanges of unpleasantries. I was asked to chair an extraordinary meeting of the College student union the following week, at which the motion of no confidence was debated for an hour. Both sides in the dispute had mobilised their forces and it was the best attended student meeting of my three years at College. Beforehand, I pointed out to the head of the student union that his opponents comprised two groups: those who wanted to punish him for his bad behaviour and those who just wanted their club’s funding restored. He agreed to a new budget that required only a minor cut to the funding for the club, after which much of the anger dissipated. At the conclusion of the debate, his supporters overturned the vote of no confidence, and he served out his term of office for a year.
I have been thinking about this episode recently. One conclusion I drew at the time, and which I still hold to be generally true, is that few people care much about the quality of political decision-making processes until such time as these processes lead to a substantive outcome that they strongly dislike. There are, no doubt, a few constitutional purists, who care deeply about the processes whereby governments, councils, boards, synods, and student unions make their decisions. Most of us, however, pay little attention to the details of the process because we mostly care about outcomes.
In the late 1990s, the UK introduced devolved government for the smaller nations: Scotland has its own Parliament, Wales has a Senedd, and Northern Ireland has an Assembly. The degree of devolution varies in each case, but there has been broad political support for the principle that the Scots, Welsh, and Northern Irish should exercise local control over their own affairs, particularly around the delivery of local public services, and concerning matters of national identity and culture. The current Conservative government in the UK was elected with a large majority in English constituencies, but is a minority party in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. Despite this lack of mandate outside of England, the UK government is currently trying to impose its own views onto its smaller neighbours. A constitutional crisis is looming, and in this case, it will not be easy to resolve.
The issue that has become the proximate cause of this crisis concerns gender and identity. In most Western nations it is now possible for individuals legally to change their gender, that is, where individuals believe that the gender they were assigned at birth is not the gender that is right for them, they are able to request that their publicly recognised gender should be changed. (This is not a new issue. There have always been people who felt uncomfortable with their assigned gender and wanted to change it, just as there have always been people who wanted to write with their left rather than their right hand, but who were forced by social convention to conform with the practice of the majority. A major step forward in social progress has been the realisation that we should allow children to determine which hand to use when writing, and adults to determine which gender they find most appropriate.)
In the UK there are rules about changing gender, which cover issues such as the age at which a person has the authority to make this decision for themselves, the length of time a person needs to demonstrate a clear conviction that they wish to change gender before they are allowed to do so for legal purposes, and whether the state should seek to involve itself in this process by requiring those who opt for recognition of a change to undergo therapy, counselling, or some other form of examination or dissuasion. In short, there are processes. This year the Scottish Parliament voted to change these rules in Scotland, making the process shorter, easier, and accessible to those aged sixteen or older (in the UK the process is currently only accessible to those over 18). These new rules have been welcomed by many groups campaigning for greater understanding of and support for those who wish legally to change their gender. The new rules have also been attacked by conservative religious groups, certain sections of the women’s movement, and several members of the UK government who have decided – for the first time – to block a decision made by the Scottish Parliament, thereby preventing it from being made into law. In brief, despite the principle of devolved government, the process by which Scots seek to have their change of gender recognised is now being decided by the English.
In my view, the Scottish Parliament have made a reasonable decision, after extensive debate and consultation. They followed the appropriate legislative process and produced a substantive outcome that has majority (but not unanimous) support. By contrast, the UK government is misusing the process that allows it to override a decision made by one of the national assemblies, simply because it sees political advantage in England of blocking the law.
The UK government’s case for veto is based on three claims. First, that if the rules about gender recognition are different in Scotland and England, it would be possible for a person to have a different legal gender in England and Scotland, and this would lead to administrative complications. Second, the UK government worries about the increased risk of fraudulent applications, and the misuse of this more permissive law to make it easier for men to intrude in safe spaces for women. Third, the UK government claims that if Scotland were to allow people aged 16 to have their change of gender recognised, this might lead to cases where a single-sex school was unable to refuse entry to a student who claimed to have changed gender. The problem with all three claims is that the numbers of people in Scotland who are expected to apply for the recognition of a change in gender each year is estimated to be between 300 and 500. This hardly seems a major administrative challenge, and while men using violence and coercion against women is a very serious social problem, there is scant evidence that those seeing recognition of a change of gender are more likely, on average, to be perpetrators of such violence.
Why would the UK government risk a constitutional crisis, putting the devolution settlement made twenty-five years ago at risk, for the small inconvenience of having to devise a way of assigning National Insurance numbers, tax references numbers, and other bureaucratic details, to a small group of people who might be recognised as women in Scotland, but are still considered men in England? I don’t think the answer to this question is hard to find. The UK government is unpopular and trailing in the opinion polls. Its electoral strategists have presumably calculated that annoying the Scots and the Welsh (who are now considering introducing similar legislation on gender recognition in the Senedd) doesn’t lose many votes in England, but running scare campaigns about safety risks in women’s toilets and girl’s schools might gain a few. It is noteworthy that in Northern Ireland, the UK government is still insisting on renegotiating the Protocol that governs cross-border trade with the EU, despite most Northern Ireland voters and Assembly members supporting the existing deal. The main reason for doing so seems to be an appeal to those English voters who remain hostile to EU. In all three of the smaller nations, the UK government is disrupting the principle of devolution of power to the local decision-makers, for reasons of electoral partisanship in England.
The head of the student union at my old College won his battle but lost the war. Nothing substantive changed in the way student societies were funded, but his reputation was damaged for the remainder of his tenure of office. I rather suspect that the UK government’s foolishness with end in the same way. It can delay and obstruct for a while, but if the smaller nations are denied the ability to run their own affairs, especially regarding issues of culture and identity, then the momentum for independence will grow ever stronger. If the perfidious English cannot learn to respect due process, they risk facing further votes of no confidence in their dwindling empire.