When will the REAL Rishi stand up?

He showed guts in facing down Sturgeon, but backtracked on fracking — and he still won’t cut taxes. No wonder his critics are asking...

How I cheered when Rishi Sunak summoned the courage to tell Nicola Sturgeon to think again about her ill-judged Gender Recognition Reform Bill.

The Scottish Nationalist First Minister and her allies evidently believe that they are at liberty to promulgate whatever laws they like north of the Border as though Scotland were an independent fiefdom. Such are the perils of devolution.

This is the first time since devolution began its lethal work of prising apart the United Kingdom that the Government in westminster has dared to invoke the Scotland Act to challenge idiotic legislation brewed in Edinburgh.

The Bill makes it easier for putative transgender people to obtain official gender recognition certificates, including by reducing waiting times, removing the need for a medical diagnosis and bringing down the minimum age from 18 to 16.

But the Government argues that the legislation flies in the face of equality laws that apply to the whole of the United Kingdom. The Supreme Court will have to rule who is correct — westminster or Edinburgh.

As I say, my immediate and overwhelming response was: Good for Rishi! Despite the claims of his critics in the Tory Party that he often blows with the prevailing wind, here he was demonstrating principle, and not shirking a fight.

And yet, within a day of his making a stand, the Government announced that it will extend a ban on ‘conversion therapy’ in England and wales to include those who wish to change their gender. This reverses a policy adopted by Boris Johnson.

Almost no one doubts that conversion therapy applied to children who say they are gay is coercive, as well as ineffective, and should be proscribed by the Government.

BUT many sensible people think the Government’s planned Bill could ensnare parents who simply want to discuss with their children their desire to change gender.

The equalities minister, Kemi Badenoch, reportedly believes that it is feasible to frame legislation which won’t prevent parents and teachers from pointing out to children the irreversible consequences of taking certain drugs or undergoing surgery.

But parents who merely want to discuss the issue with their children in a calm way may be frightened of being represented by campaigners as intrusive bullies, and could fall foul of the law, notwithstanding the Government’s assurances.

wouldn’t it be far better to leave things as they are? Very few children who are considering changing sex are subjected to conversion therapy. The traffic seems to be almost entirely in the opposite direction, with doctors and others sometimes pressurising children to go ahead without the consequences being properly weighed.

So I am mystified that, while having the guts to oppose Nicola Sturgeon — effectively supporting women who don’t want their ‘ safe spaces’ invaded by transgender people who declare themselves to be women — Rishi Sunak should also risk interfering in the rights and duties of parents.

A true Tory would not do so. A true Tory has faith in the ability of most parents, and children who may be troubled, to discuss these issues in their own way without the State poking its nose into their affairs.

Needless to say, the illiberal Scots Nats do things differently. In 2020 they passed a hate crimes Bill, which criminalised speech deemed capable of ‘ stirring up hatred’ against groups of people with ‘protected characteristics’.

Such speech includes conversations over the privacy of the kitchen table. People could face prosecution for cracking the wrong joke about disabled or trans issues, or conceivably even being rude about the egregious Nicola Sturgeon.

The Hate Crime and Public order (Scotland) Bill is on ice at the moment, even though it has received Royal Assent, because police and the judiciary north of the border can’t work out how to apply it. Here is another piece of crass legislation which westminster should have had the courage to veto, but didn’t.

Back to Rishi, and the apparent contradiction between his standing up to Sturgeon’s Gender Recognition Reform Bill and his embracing legislation which could interfere with the rights of parents to discuss issues with their children.

Even though I praised the PM on the first count, it occurs to me that he wasn’t taking a huge political risk since, according to opinion polls, more Scots oppose aspects of Sturgeon’s Bill than support them.

Mr Sunak is not going to be accused by most Scottish people of meddling in their affairs for the simple reason that the majority of them probably agree with his reservations about the Bill.

Am I being unfair to Rishi? Maybe a bit. Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt, and congratulate him for taking the right course even if he wasn’t risking a tremendous amount by doing so.

Yet there undoubtedly remains a problem. our Prime Minister is an enigma. His critics say that he is as wet as a newly landed trout, and virtually a socialist. His defenders say, no, he’s admittedly a pragmatist, but economically he is actually ‘dry’, and a robust Tory in all sorts of ways.

which is it? we can make a brief log. on the charge of wetness and zigzagging, there was his abandonment of fracking as soon as he became Prime Minister, despite his approval of it during the Tory leadership campaign last summer, as long as it enjoyed local support.

So far as taxation is concerned, there almost certainly won’t be any cuts in Jeremy Hunt’s spring Budget. From this April, this country will have the highest ever taxes in peacetime, and the longer this continues to be the case, the more difficult it will be for Mr Sunak to defend his Tory credentials.

In insisting on minimum service levels in parts of the public sector, the PM has done better, though the legislative process may take so long that the present wave of strikes will have finished by the time a new Bill is passed. It should have been done earlier.

The unelected Lords will oppose the Bill, as they will the plan to amend, repeal and replace some 4,000 pieces of EU law that were retained on the statute book after Brexit. Some Tories joined Labour in harrying the Government over its proposals during a Commons debate yesterday.

JUST as it is difficult to reconcile the Prime Minister who opposed Sturgeon with the man who plans to apply a ban on conversion therapy in transgender cases, so it’s hard to discern much consistency in Mr Sunak’s approach. Sometimes he cuts and runs, occasionally he tacks, and once in a while he chooses to fight.

To be fair, his ambiguity over transgender issues is dwarfed by the confusion of Labour. Its leader, Sir Keir Starmer, has expressed reservations about aspects of Nicola Sturgeon’s Bill, but yesterday opposed the Government blocking it.

Meanwhile, Rosie Duffield, a feminist backbench Labour MP, has accused Sir Keir of ignoring her after she was jeered by party colleagues in the Commons for criticising the Bill.

In more ways than one, Labour is vulnerable. The truth is that we could do with less of the managerial Rishi Sunak, and much more of the politician who gives signs of having some solid Tory beliefs. will the real Prime Minister ever stand up to be counted?