‘Beyond the culture wars: Labour in government must be confident enough to hold complexity’

Most people are not sitting over their cornflakes, itching for a fight about pronouns, statues, immigration, race, sex, class, or identity. They are stepping through a world that feels more uncertain than it did a decade ago. They want safe streets and functioning public services. They want their children to thrive. They want fairness at work. They want to know that if they are vulnerable, someone will notice and care; they want dignity.

Most people are not extremists. Yet our public discourse increasingly rewards those who behave as though they are. The challenge facing Britain is not that we disagree too much. It is that we have forgotten how to disagree well.

As someone who has spent years working in leadership, organisational culture, and psychological safety, I have become convinced that our politics is reproducing exactly the conditions under which organisations fail. When people fear social punishment, they stop speaking honestly. When they stop speaking honestly, leaders receive poorer information. When leaders receive poorer information, decision-making deteriorates. Eventually reality reasserts itself, often at enormous human cost.

The answer is not the elimination of disagreement; the solution is learning to challenge productively and harnessing the collective intelligence of all the traditions of the Labour movement, including those we might personally disagree with.

READ MORE: Inside Mainstream: the soft left’s plan to end Labour’s factional wars

Labour, at its best, has understood this. The Labour tradition has never been about demanding uniformity of thought. It has been about creating opportunities and environments capable of holding differences: between worker and employer, between city and town, between individual rights and collective responsibilities, between autonomy, liberty, and solidarity. Solidarity is not groupthink. It is the ability to remain in relationship with people whose experiences, priorities and conclusions differ from our own. That principle matters enormously when it comes to equality.

I disagree with recent Conservative arguments that the Public Sector Equality Duty should be scrapped. The duty serves an important purpose. Properly understood, it requires public authorities to carefully consider how their decisions affect the people they serve. It encourages anticipation rather than reaction, prevention rather than remedy. It asks public authority institutions to consider whether barriers exist and whether opportunities to advance equality can be realised.

In other words, it is a discipline of thoughtfulness. The problem is not the existence of the Public Sector Equality Duty. The problem is that too few people understand what it is. One of the more dispiriting developments since the General Election in 2024 has been the extent to which elected representatives repeatedly conflate policy making, legislating, and regulating.Similarly, they conflate different concepts such as the Equality Act 2010, the Public Sector Equality Duty, and Equality Impact Assessments. They are not interchangeable.

The Equality Act establishes legal protections against discrimination. The Public Sector Equality Duty requires public authorities and organisations exercising public functions to have due regard to the need to eliminate discrimination, advance equality of opportunity and foster good relations between people who share a protected characteristic and those who do not. Equality Impact Assessments are one way, though not the only way, for organisations to demonstrate that they have given due regard to those duties. The distinction matters because poor understanding leads to poor policymaking, poor legislation, poor political commentary, and the continued fuelling of culture war narratives. It fuels public mistrust and creates fertile ground for those eager to portray our equality and human rights framework as either an ideological crusade or meaningless bureaucratic theatre. Neither characterisation is true.

In my view, training in equality law should be mandatory for all Labour Party parliamentary candidates; I would extend this to all mayoral and council candidates as well. It is reasonable to expect a basic understanding of one of the central legal frameworks governing rights and responsibilities in modern Britain.

Perhaps the most neglected truth within these debates is this: every single person in the United Kingdom has protected characteristics: age, sex, gender reassignment, disability, race, religion or belief, sexual orientation, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy, and maternity. No one stands outside the law of equality, looking in.

Equality legislation was never intended to divide the country into competing categories of deservingness, even when at times some rights inevitably collide. Yet a hierarchy of importance has emerged, where some appear more worthy of protection, empathy, or legitimacy than others. This does nothing to advance equality. It does nothing to foster good relations. And it certainly does nothing to reduce the sense of grievance and alienation on which polarisation thrives.

As a former National Women’s Officer of the Labour Party, it will not surprise you that I am a feminist. I believe women and girls deserve dignity, opportunity, privacy and safety. I believe safeguarding matters. I believe that sex remains a meaningful category in law and public policy. I felt this keenly when working on the Sex Discrimination (Election of Candidates) Act 2002.

As the first Head of Equalities of the Labour Party, I also believe that transgender people deserve respect, protection from discrimination and the opportunity to participate fully in society without fear of abuse or harassment. I believe that gender reassignment remains a meaningful category in law and public policy. I felt that just as keenly when I worked on the Gender Recognition Act 2004.

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These positions are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, I suspect they reflect the instincts of most people in this country. Yet we have allowed ourselves to become trapped between rival forms of authoritarianism.

Farage and Reform band around generalisations of discrimination and inequality as little more than elite preoccupations or “woke” excess. Complex social realities are reduced to simplistic narratives of betrayal and blame to generate populist slogans. 

Polanski’s Greens, progressives and some in the Labour Party, adopt what might be called liberal authoritarianism. The belief that disagreement is evidence of moral deficiency; that questioning orthodoxies reflects prejudice rather than curiosity; that the appropriate response to discomfort is social sanction rather than democratic persuasion.

Both approaches diminish us. Both seek certainty over complexity. Both narrow the range of acceptable speech. Both encourage us to sort people into categories of good and bad rather than recognising our shared humanity and inevitable fallibility. And both betray a lack of faith in one of the most powerful ideas at the heart of progressive politics: that difference can be productive.

Historically, the trade union movement understood this. The cooperative movement understood this. The post-war architects of the welfare state understood this. 

Democracy is not the absence of conflict. It is the practice of working through conflict without destroying one another.

For electoral survival and the capacity to grow in Government, Labour must resist the temptation to play to the gallery of either Reform’s populist impulses or the liberal authoritarian certainties that have alienated many voters who might otherwise share progressive aims. Labour in Government can reclaim its historic role as a movement capable of holding complexity. A movement confident enough to admit uncertainty, curious enough to ask difficult questions, humble enough to hear uncomfortable answers and courageous enough to distinguish disagreement from discrimination.

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Britain does not need politicians who can win the latest media skirmish in a self-manufactured culture war. It needs leaders mature enough to build the conditions in which people who disagree profoundly can still belong to one another.

That is harder work. But it is the work of democracy, and it is the work Labour was created to do.

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