Public will just vote in new politicians if they are ignored
When I talk to people who aren’t involved in Edinburgh City Council it is common for them to suggest that councillors regularly ignore or even deliberately try to frustrate the public. This week the Education Committee took that to a whole new level of Alice in Wonderland bizarreness.
For over an hour the Greens, SNP and Lib Dems lined up to bemoan that they were being made to accept a policy that would keep the council in line with the law. The Labour administration, with greatest access to the unequivocal legal advice, was largely silent. The issue was the provision of toilets in schools. Before the summer holidays Edinburgh had some schools that only had gender-neutral toilets. This is weird because the regulations that say you must have single sex provision go all the way back to 1967.
There was also the UK Supreme Court’s clarification of the definition of sex as meaning biological sex in the Equality Act 2010. This has a similar effect of protecting single sex spaces like female only toilets. It takes a whole new level of weirdness to suggest, as one councillor did, that the law on single sex toilets in schools was still “evolving” after a definitive ruling by the highest court in the land.
Neither of these pieces of law have changed. Rather, the “luxury beliefs” of some councillors led them to ignore them. Now they want to keep their fingers in their ears with the legal bill being at your expense. Only robust legal advice stopped them. The new policy doesn’t even remove all gender-neutral provision. It just ensures single sex provision is available.
A YouGov poll in August showed that 54 per cent of the public think there should only be separate toilets for men and women in public places with a further 35 per cent saying that we should have both single sex facilities and gender-neutral provision. In effect, 89 per cent of the public support the position that council officers wanted to implement to comply with the law or would go further. I suspect those proportions would increase again if you asked specifically about schools – especially if you asked parents of teenage girls.
Many of these local politicians regularly bemoan some of the more radical shifts we are seeing in political party polling. What they don’t get is that if they keep ignoring what the public think the public will decide to get some new politicians.
Iain Whyte is Conservative group leader on Edinburgh City Council