When Ideology Refuses the Law: Brighton Council, the Equality Act, and the Erosion of Public Trust
There is something profoundly troubling about elected officials speaking as though the law were an optional inconvenience rather than an obligation. One expects campaigners to protest legislation they dislike. One even expects politicians to advocate reform. But what one ought never to expect in a constitutional democracy is the tacit suggestion that public authorities may simply resist or disregard laws until activists succeed in changing them. This principle is not merely political but constitutional: the rule of law requires that public bodies act within powers conferred by Parliament and in accordance with statute as authoritatively interpreted by the courts.¹
Yet this is precisely the impression created by the response of Brighton & Hove City Council leadership to the recent Equality and Human Rights Commission guidance on single-sex spaces following the Supreme Court’s clarification of the Equality Act 2010. The EHRC, established by statute, is charged with promoting and enforcing compliance with equality law, and its guidance exists precisely to assist public authorities in meeting their legal obligations.²
Councillor Bella Sankey’s statement frames the guidance as something novel, alarming, and destabilising, creating “confusion and concern” and demanding that Parliament urgently legislate to clarify rights for trans-identifying individuals. She further asserted that the guidance “creates a deeply confusing picture” and risks individuals being excluded from facilities aligned with either sex.³ But herein lies the fundamental problem: the relevant law has already existed for sixteen years.
The Equality Act 2010 is not new legislation. Nor did the Supreme Court invent a new principle out of thin air. What occurred was clarification of existing law. The Court interpreted provisions Parliament itself enacted, affirming that, for the purposes of single-sex exemptions within the Equality Act, the term sex refers to biological sex, while maintaining protections against discrimination for those with the protected characteristic of gender reassignment.⁴ The legal architecture was already there. The law was extant. The obligations were already binding. The Court itself emphasised that it was engaged in statutory interpretation, not legislative innovation, applying the meaning of Parliament’s enactment rather than altering it.⁴
This makes much contemporary outrage ring strangely hollow. One is left asking: where exactly have some public authorities been for the last decade and a half?
If a council, NHS trust, school, police force, or leisure provider has failed to maintain lawful single-sex provision where appropriate under the Equality Act, this is not a failure caused by the Supreme Court judgment. It is evidence that institutions have spent years operating according to ideological assumptions rather than statutory duties. The statutory framework has always permitted such provision where justified as “a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim,” including considerations of privacy, dignity, and safeguarding.⁵
The same pattern is increasingly visible elsewhere across public institutions. In Scotland, universities were recently criticised after it emerged that many had failed to align policies on single-sex spaces with the Equality Act despite the Supreme Court’s clarification. Critics argued that institutions had continued operating according to self-identification frameworks rather than statutory definitions. Fiona McAnena of Sex Matters observed: “These universities are prioritising the feelings of young men who say they are women…. The devastating message to women and girls is that they are second-class citizens.”⁶ The controversy again exposed the deeper issue at stake: not uncertainty over new law, but reluctance to apply long-extant law where doing so conflicts with prevailing ideological commitments.
Indeed, the Supreme Court itself stressed that its judgment did not create a new legal regime but provided an authoritative interpretation of the Equality Act as enacted. The House of Commons Library subsequently confirmed that “the judgment has not changed the law,” but clarified how it is to be understood and applied.⁷
This distinction matters enormously. Political disagreement with the law is lawful. Deliberately declining to apply existing law because one dislikes its implications is not. In public law terms, such conduct risks falling outside lawful authority and may be subject to challenge where public bodies substitute policy preference for statutory duty.¹
Councillor Sankey is entirely free, as any citizen or politician should be, to campaign for legislative change. She may argue that the Equality Act ought to be amended. She may contend that Parliament should redefine sex categories or alter exemptions. Such arguments belong properly within democratic politics. But until Parliament changes the law, Brighton & Hove City Council has both a legal and moral obligation to abide by it.
Indeed, the morality here is every bit as important as the legality. The rule of law depends upon an elementary civic virtue: those entrusted with public office are stewards of laws, not proprietors of them. A council leader is not elected to decide which statutes align sufficiently with contemporary ideology to merit compliance. Public officials have a fiduciary duty to administer law impartially, particularly when doing so proves politically inconvenient.
What would happen if this principle were abandoned more broadly? Would councils sympathetic to anti-immigration causes be permitted to disregard equality legislation until they persuaded Parliament to change it? Could a conservative authority ignore climate obligations because councillors regarded them as misguided? Might a local government refuse housing duties because ideology suggested alternative priorities? Of course not. We instinctively recognise such conduct as improper, unlawful, and corrosive to democratic legitimacy. The consistency of legal application is itself a core component of equality before the law.
Yet too often there appears to be an unspoken exception for fashionable ideological causes.
This exposes a growing and dangerous tendency in modern governance: the replacement of constitutional duty with activist administration. Increasingly, some political actors appear less interested in governing according to law than in treating institutions as vehicles for social transformation, to be bent toward ideological ends regardless of legal boundaries. The law becomes something to comply with only when convenient, resist when uncomfortable, and reinterpret until political outcomes are achieved. Such patterns have been noted where institutional guidance departs from statutory frameworks, particularly in equality and regulatory contexts.⁵
Such conduct is not progressive. It is profoundly illiberal.
The irony, moreover, is striking. Much of the rhetoric surrounding these developments invokes “rights,” “equity,” and “the rule of law.” Yet rights become meaningless if public institutions selectively administer statutes according to political sympathies. Equality before the law ceases to exist when officials imply that settled legal obligations may simply be suspended pending ideological victory.
There are, of course, serious pastoral and practical concerns regarding how trans-identifying individuals navigate public life. A civilised society should reject cruelty, harassment, and humiliation. Nobody should be mistreated. But compassion does not nullify law. Nor does emotional difficulty justify legal incoherence. The challenge for policymakers is to balance competing rights within the framework Parliament has enacted—not to ignore one set of rights because acknowledging them is politically uncomfortable. The Equality Act itself is structured precisely to balance such competing claims through proportionate exceptions.⁵
What is perhaps most astonishing is the portrayal of the EHRC guidance as though it were some unprecedented rupture in legal norms. It is not. It reflects principles already embedded in legislation passed in 2010. Sixteen years. Sixteen years during which public bodies had every opportunity—indeed, every obligation—to align policy with law.
That some institutions now respond with indignation says less about legal uncertainty than about the extent to which ideology has displaced statutory discipline within parts of public administration. The recurring pattern across councils, schools, universities, and public bodies suggests that this is no isolated misunderstanding, but a broader culture within sections of institutional governance whereby activist assumptions have gradually been permitted to supersede statutory interpretation.
Brighton & Hove City Council may campaign all it wishes for legislative reform. That is politics. But until and unless Parliament changes the law, the council remains morally and legally obliged to follow the Equality Act as it stands—not as activists wish it to be.
For what confidence can citizens have in public institutions if those entrusted with enforcing law quietly decide they need not obey it themselves?
¹ Associated Provincial Picture Houses Ltd v Wednesbury Corporation [1948] 1 KB 223; R (Miller) v Prime Minister [2019] UKSC 41.
² Equality Act 2006, ss. 8–9 (establishing the Equality and Human Rights Commission and its enforcement role).
³ Brighton & Hove City Council, “Council leader’s statement following EHRC guidance on single sex spaces,” May 2026.
⁴ For Women Scotland Ltd v Scottish Ministers [2024] UKSC 16.
⁵ Equality Act 2010, ss. 4, 11–12; Schedule 3, paras. 26–28; Equality and Human Rights Commission, Services, Public Functions and Associations: Statutory Code of Practice (2011; updated guidance 2024–2025).
⁶ Fiona McAnena, quoted in Scottish Daily Express, “Scottish universities slammed as only one complies with law on single-sex spaces,” 2026.
⁷ UK Parliament, House of Commons Library, The Equality Act 2010 and the Supreme Court judgment on the meaning of sex, Briefing Paper, 2025.
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- Today’s Mass: June 13 S. Anthony of Padua
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