Inside The Lords: amendments, loopholes and by-elections

Claire Fox reports from a turbulent week in the Upper House.

Inside the Lords this week, I began by giving a speech on the incestuous paedophile who changed his name to Claire Fox. I was made aware of the case by his daughter and victim - Ceri-Lee Galvin, a very brave young woman who broke her own anonymity to campaign against sex offenders being able to change their gender and identity. Labour MP Sarah Champion has won an amendment blocking sex offenders from changing their name via deed poll - but this didn’t cover individuals who changed their gender.

Ceri-Lee made me aware that her father Claire Fox - real name Clive Bundy - had the potential to disappear from sex-offenders registers and avoid safeguarding checks like DBS after leaving prison, simply by changing his gender and therefore his name. By the way, Ceri-Lee spoke at the Battle of Ideas festival last year on a discussion called GENDER IDEOLOGY AND CRIMINAL JUSTICE, which you should listen to if you have time.

There have been many victims’ stories given during discussion of the Victim and Crime Bill - always given respect and support. But my speech was treated differently. The Labour and Lib Dem benches - usually the first to champion victims’ rights and protecting women and children from sexual predators - told me that my amendment closing this loophole was too difficult, that there weren’t many people who were affected and that it wasn’t a big deal. I was outraged. As I pointed out last week in relation to data collection, it seems bizarre that all these parliamentarians who claim to care about proper reporting and protection to combat violence against women don’t care about knowing who has actually committed crimes.

An ugly example of this playing out in practice was the bizarre reporting of Scarlet Blake, the trans woman who murdered Jorge Martin Carreno and tortured a cat. Across the press, Blake was referred to as a woman, causing confusion and upset when it was revealed that ‘she’ was being sent to a man’s prison. What is much worse is that the police admitted that they had recorded Scarlet Blake as a woman who had committed a crime - this is dangerous for truth-telling in justice. A shout out to BBC Radio 4 Today programme’s Justin Webb, who is perhaps one of the few journalists brave enough to tell it how it is when he described trans women as ‘in other words, males’. Unfortunately, the BBC doesn’t agree with presenters telling the truth, and has upheld a complaint made against him.

Life in the Lords can be odd. Straight after the discussion of gender and crime reporting, in which Lib Dem Baroness Brinton opposed my amendment, I found myself supporting her motion of regret about physician associates (PAs) and anaesthetist associates (AAs). The allegation goes that these PAs and AAs are being used to fill doctor slots, despite not being qualified enough, with patients unaware that they are not seeing proper doctors. We ended up having a really good debate on NHS workforce organisation and what constitutes proper care. It goes to show that agreement can come from unexpected places in the Lords.

Finally - the big news is, of course, the election of George Galloway in Rochdale. When I recorded Inside The Lords on Thursday, we were awaiting news of the by-election and everyone was still obsessed with the ridiculous Lee Anderson comments. There is an inability to talk about Islamism, and the reaction to Anderson’s claims - however stupidly boorish - has revealed the cowardice among our political elite.

It should be possible to oppose prejudice and be able to talk about the very real issue of Islamist intimidation and threat. Indeed, the spotlight on the issue of anti-Semitism within the pro-Gaza movement has been made clearer by the election in Rochdale. We cannot let accusations of Islamophobia silence criticism and scrutiny of Islamism. The cowardice and incompetency of the mainstream political parties left a void for Galloway and others to fill - a pattern that might repeat itself in the General Election if we don’t get serious about openly debating these concerns.

While I may despise Galloway’s views - on Israel, in particular - we need to resist a mainstream moral panic about extremists in Westminster. Sadly, the powers that be will label any challenge extreme. The status quo is not worthy of defence. The cowardly, lacklustre technocrats need to be shaken up, and that won’t always happen in the ways we would choose.