Crown Prosecution Service not trusted due to Stonewall link

22 May 2020

Carys Moseley comments on a how the CPS is issuing biased advice due to its allegiance to Stonewall.

A teenage girl is threatening legal action against the Crown Prosecution Service for being biased over transgender issues due to its membership of Stonewall’s Diversity Champions programme. She is being represented by Safe Schools Alliance and Fair Cop. In the past week she had previously succeeded in getting the CPS to withdraw its guidance for schools on homophobic, biphobic and transphobic bullying, on the grounds that it did not take her single-sex based rights seriously.

CPS promised review not trusted

In response to the first legal threat the CPS had said that it would conduct an internal review of the anti-bullying guidance. However, lawyers acting on her behalf say that the CPS’ position is based on misrepresenting the Equality Act 2010 and that this in turn is due to it taking its cue from Stonewall.

The girl told The Times that she does not trust the Crown Prosecution Service:

“I do not believe the CPS can be fair as they are listening to Stonewall, who are misrepresenting what the law says about my rights to female-only spaces. I do not trust them to focus on the safety, privacy and dignity of girls, or to balance the rights of all young people in schools.”

CPS intrusion into school policy and discipline

The CPS guidance says that if ‘incidents’ could be shown to be motivated by ‘hatred’, e.g. hostility to a person’s transgender identity, they should be treated more seriously. It also says that if this motivation could be proven, then a judge or magistrate should take it into account when sentencing. Lawyers acting for the teenage girl say that this goes far beyond the Equality Act 2010.

It is important to realise here that the CPS guidance means that criminal law has been allowed to encroach on schools’ anti-bullying policies. Not all bullying constitutes a criminal offence. In addition the fact that the CPS – which is very close to the police – has been allowed to draw up anti-bullying guidelines in the first place raises serious questions as it draws the police more and more into schools to regulate speech.

Conflating anti-bullying policies with hate crime law

At stake here is the conflation of anti-bullying policies with hate crime law and policy. This has happened because the CPS long ago teamed up with the police to come up with a definition of hate crime that is also closely linked to the concept of ‘pre-crime’ hate ‘incidents’.

Whilst a hate crime is any crime that is also deemed to be motivated by hatred of the alleged victim in relation to one of the protected characteristics (including transgender status but not sex), a ‘hate incident’ is not a crime. Rather, it is any incident where someone is alleged to have communicated ‘hatred’ on such grounds, and such a ‘hate incident’ can be considered by the police to signal that this means a crime was more likely to be committed.

Stonewall’s Diversity Champions programme

In relation to the legal threat by this teenage girl, Stonewall told The Times:

“The diversity champions programme supports organisations to make their workplaces more inclusive of lesbian, gay, bi and trans people. This work is absolutely vital as more than a third of LGBT staff, 35 per cent, hide who they are at work while one in five, 18 per cent, have been the target of negative comments because they’re LGBT. We’re proud to work with so many different organisations who want to create spaces where every LGBT person is accepted for who they are.”

Stonewall’s Diversity Champions programme is a membership scheme for employers to support them to become more LGBT-inclusive, and to offer ‘empowerment training’ schemes to ‘help people understand the issues faced by LGBT people’. Organisations pay an annual fee to receive benefits.

In September 2019 Third Sector magazine reported that in the previous financial year, the Diversity Champions programme brought in £2,573,210 for Stonewall. Stonewall was said to be working with more than 850 member organisations, an increase from 500 in 2014, including 180 global members.

Link with Stonewall Workplace Equality Index

One of the major benefits offered in return for membership of the Diversity Champions programme is that organisations will receive thorough information about where they stand in the Stonewall Workplace Equality Index, benchmarked against work sectors and regions. What this means is that organisations have an incentive to compete against other organisations in the same region or sector to be the most LGBT-inclusive.

Rankings of organisations in the Top 100 of the Stonewall Workplace Equality Index are published annually, as are comparisons with previous years. This in itself increases the competitiveness, the virtue-signalling and the shaming of those who fall behind.

The capture of government departments

Many government organisations are or have been either Stonewall Diversity Champions or in the Stonewall Workplace Equality Index. For example, the Home Office, the Government Legal Department, the Crown Office, the Procurator Fiscal Service in Scotland, the Intellectual Property Office, the Department for International Trade, and the Environmental Agency are all on the Index.

However, it is possible to fall down the rankings. The Department for Education did not make it to the Top 100 this year, whereas it was 59th in 2019. This is probably due to perceived shilly-shallying over the introduction of Relationships and Sex Education in response to outrage by mostly Muslim parents. As the Department for Education is one of the government departments most deeply infiltrated by Stonewall, this is very important.

Challenging institutional capture

In January this year the Ministry of Justice was named as the top government department for employing LGBT staff. This is hardly surprising given that the permanent private secretary who heads it is a gay activist well-established in the civil service. It is also unsurprising given that it is the Ministry of Justice that has caused the problems with policies allowing transgender prisoners to pick the prisons of their preferred gender. This policy has led to male sex offenders being housed in women’s prisons and raping staff and prisoners.

In light of this, it is totally unsurprising that a teenage girl in Oxfordshire is threatening the CPS, which is very close to the Ministry of Justice, and just as bad in pushing transgender policies.

In addition, it is important to realise that the transgender charity Gendered Intelligence, which works with trans young adults, was also involved in drawing up the CPS guidance, as was the teaching union NASUWT, along with the National Police Chiefs’ Council. It is worth asking here why NASUWT is the only teaching union involved. Are other teaching unions seeing sense, perhaps due to teachers themselves protesting behind closed doors? Finally, what is known about the views of ordinary police officers on the whole idea of policing schools in this manner? Is it not telling that only police chiefs were consulted?

Radical reform of the Crown Prosecution Service needed

It is significant that the Crown Prosecution Service declined to make any statement on these matters to The Times when asked. In reality, this shows a spectacular level of arrogance that needs to be confronted. However, this is hardly sufficient.

The present government did say in the Queen’s Speech last December that it wanted to have a Royal Commission on Criminal Justice. It is high time that there was a major revision of the criminal justice system given twenty years of infiltration by transgender activists. It cannot be allowed to continue making up the law unilaterally circumventing Parliament, as it has done so with hate crime, let alone doing so according to a script written by Stonewall. Radical reform is required.

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