Stella Creasy hates questions

There are some MPs whose contribution to the democratic process often seems to consist largely of asking, “Does my ego look big in this?” on social media. Stella Creasy is one such camera phone gazing politician.

Earlier this week, the Walthamstow MP posted a video where she valiantly attempted to explain parliamentary procedure, the use of statutory instruments and to justify her decision to sponsor an Early Day Motion aimed at blocking the EHRC’s revised Code of Practice. Unfortunately, her grasp of the subject was somewhat less secure than her confidence.

Proposed by Labour’s Nadia Whittome MP, once the Baby of the House and now its stroppiest toddler, the EDM calls on Parliament to “disapprove” guidance for businesses and charities on how to comply with the Equality Act 2010. In essence, it is a piece of administrative virtue signalling: a way for a faction of Labour and Liberal Democrat MPs to demonstrate that, on this issue at least, they are every bit as mental as the Greens they have happily joined forces with. Among its co-sponsors is Green MP Siân Berry, who has since written to the Prime Minister and Bridget Phillipson urging them to reject the EHRC’s supposedly “cruel and confusing” Code. Creasy, meanwhile, chose to make her case on social media.

Lawyers, constitutional nerds and hundreds of better-informed X users swiftly descended to explain to Creasy and her colleagues that not liking the law, and specifically the single-sex exemptions, is not grounds for attempting to derail the guidance. Among them was the formidable former EHRC commissioner Akua Reindorf KC, who posed a simple question:

Stella, simply put, the Code is not law. Therefore it’s not apt for parliamentary scrutiny.

Please could you tell us what your objections to it are? It must be either that you think the Code has got the law wrong, or that you think the law is wrong.

This did not dent Creasy’s resolve or breezy confidence.

“Well clearly I think the code isn’t right because I am supporting measures to prevent its application,” she explained to another sceptical lawyer, Dennis Kavanagh. To date, despite multiple attempts to extract an answer on X, Creasy has not managed to explain what it is about the code she thinks “isn’t right”.

The logic of the EDM is a bit like shouting at a map because you don’t like where the road goes. As journalist Sonia Sodha astutely observed, the level of understanding amongst MPs is disturbingly poor:

If you don’t like what the law says, you need to advocate for changes to the law to enable single-sex facilities and services to operate instead as single-gender-identity facilities and services…

But the last couple of weeks have made painfully clear that there are MPs who are either not bright enough to understand this, or too dishonest to say they disagree with the law as it stands, and so who resort to attacking the EHRC instead.

Creasy belongs to a class of politicians that treat criticism not as evidence they might be wrong, but as proof they must be right. Having decided her detractors are nasty people, she takes their mockery, superior knowledge or probing questions as confirmation of her own virtue. The fact that she is a public figure with huge responsibility, and therefore subject to scrutiny, appears not to trouble her. To Creasy, comments are not about her politics, they are all, always, personal.

Whatever these MPs imagine themselves to be, they are not outsiders

What Whittome, Creasy and their fellow EDM signatories are doing is about more than the EHRC Code. It is a struggle for anti-establishment kudos. It is the political equivalent of cringe-inducing dad dancing at the school disco (something for which Creasy has form). Or perhaps, in their cases, ballot box botox.

Whittome arrived in Parliament in 2019 as its youngest MP. Now thirty, she sits on the Women and Equalities Select Committee, where only a minority of her committee colleagues have backed the motion.

Meanwhile, Stella Creasy has spent more than sixteen years on the green benches. Whatever these MPs imagine themselves to be, they are not outsiders.

This is what the noise about the EHRC guidance is really about. It is a mating display: an attempt to woo the identitarian left and reassure activists that they are still one of the good ones. Look at me, they cry from the safety of their parliamentary seats. I am still resisting power. I am still sticking it to the (self-identified) man.

Which is why the whole thing feels so desperate. The EHRC Code reflects the law. Blocking it would not change the Supreme Court judgment or make single-sex services unlawful. The EDM’s most realistic achievement is a few approving nods from activists and, in Creasy’s case, the faint hope that Zack Polanski decides to come for somebody else’s seat.