Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill — House of Lords, 2021-11-15
Topic: Civil Rights
Shami Chakrabarti (Labour, Centre-left): My Lords, I am afraid it is not just the Government who are split on this. With two notable exceptions, rarely have so many noble Barons spoken with such passion and at such length for the dignity of women—and there is nothing wrong with late-flowering feminism. I say that quite sincerely to the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, who I had the privilege of advising as a young lawyer in the Home Office some years ago now. There is nothing wrong with late-flowering feminism and, indeed, nothing wrong with speaking up for the dignity of all people. I say that as a self-identifying feminist and human rights campaigner The debate has ranged widely, which may be fine even at this late hour, but it has ranged beyond the specific issue. Noble Lords have brought up various issues to do with the lexicon and whether people feel that their dignity is lost, or that somehow their femaleness, or their womanhood, is challenged by newcomers, migrants to their sex, et cetera. To get back to the actual issue, life is complicated, prisons are vulnerable spaces and everybody in prison is inherently potentially threatening but also potentially vulnerable. I want to get back to the actual substance of this amendment and what it is trying to address. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, that, if he and I were trapped in a lift with a third person—this is just a hypothetical, not an invitation, I promise—and the third person was a cis woman, born a woman, still a woman, always a woman, but none the less a white supremacist with previous convictions as long as your arm for violence against non-white women, I would feel much more threatened by the presence of that offender than by the presence of the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra. He is looking quizzical, but my point is that the Secretary of State has responsibilities to people in custody, in particular, and to people in vulnerable spaces that cannot be dealt with using the blunt instrument of an amendment like this. I am not making nit-picking points. I am trying to address points that I think the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, tried to make early on. Forgive me—it is no criticism, but some noble Lords responded subsequently with speeches which were understandably carefully prepared in advance, without the opportunity to hear her rather sensitive and thoughtful setting out of the way in which the Government to date are trying to address their administrative and serious human rights responsibilities to deal with all vulnerable people in prison I suggest to the noble Lord that in the hypothetical lift I would be at far greater risk from the white supremacist with previous convictions. This is not a total hypothetical, because this has happened in male prisons where non-white offenders have been murdered by fellow cis males—that being the term for people born and always a man—because of a lack of diligence about the offending and attitudinal profile of a person If we really care about people being safe in custody, which we must, this will not be resolved by a blunt instrument. This is not a drafting point or a nit-picking point. In my view, we have too many people—and I suggest too many women—in prison anyway, and we need to pay more attention to who is with whom and how we are taking care of them Something like this amendment, which says that your birth sex is always your sex for the purposes of imprisonment and incarceration, would mean that someone born a woman who then went through hormone therapy, possibly more interventionist therapies and even surgery would always be in a women’s prison. That would not necessarily always be the right outcome What I am trying to suggest is that, yes, I care about being a woman and, yes, I care about being a feminist, but I am a human first and foremost. I do not hate men. I do not fear all men. I am not a self-loathing cis woman. I believe that in this Committee, perhaps more than anywhere, we should be capable of taking some of the heat out of these sensitive issues, as I think we tried to do in an earlier—I called it historic—debate. Debates about the lexicon and wider dignity, important and heated though they are, will not make women safer and they will not make prisoners safer.