Should the Equality Act 2010 be scrapped? Last week, Reform UK set the cat among the pigeons in the Leftie Blob by pledging to do just that. Suella Braverman, Reform’s new Shadow Education and Skills Secretary, said Britain is being “ripped apart by diversity, equality and inclusion” and promised to “build a country defined by meritocracy not tokenism”. Readers will not be surprised to hear that I heartily agree, and I set out some reasons why in the Spectator:

For one thing, it has encouraged untold vexatious complaints in the workplace. A recent report by Don’t Divide Us found a seven-fold increase in employment discrimination claims around race between 2016-17 to 2023-24, despite just 5% of claims being successful over the whole period. The Act’s focus on personal identity and victimhood encouraged a grievance culture, it found, which far from easing racial tensions was only exacerbating them further.

In particular, it is the Act’s Public Sector Equality Duty and “positive action” wheezes which have made it a vehicle for systematic discrimination against less politically favoured groups – whites and men. While the Act outlaws ‘positive discrimination’, where minorities are explicitly hired preferentially, it doesn’t outlaw “positive action”, where minority groups get special outreach programmes, which we’re supposed to think is fair and unobjectionable. But as those would-be airmen know, this is really a distinction without a difference. If you’re giving a leg-up to some groups to increase ‘diversity’, you’re not giving them to others. “Institutions should be held accountable for treating people fairly rather than hitting artificial demographic targets’” says James Orr, Reform’s new head of policy.

I added:

While critics will no doubt try to paint Equality Act reform as extreme, the policy hits a healthy middle ground. Orr explains: “The Equality Act consolidated pre-existing legislation on disability, sex and race discrimination. Reform UK supports the predecessor legislation and unequivocally opposes discrimination based on protected characteristics.”

Much as I predicted, Keir Starmer himself furiously waded into this debate with nasal sound and fury, denouncing Reform’s plan as “shocking” and against “basic values”, and even suggesting that wanting to repeal it was un-British.

Typical Starmerite intellectual dreck. This damaging, unpopular law, rushed through Parliament at the fag end of the Brown premiership, is hardly Magna Carta.

Still, the comment gave the debate extra legs, and so it was that I found myself invited onto BBC One’s Sunday Morning Live, a “faith and ethics debate show” which airs after Laura Kuenssberg’s politics programme.

I would be debating Nels Abbey, who once wrote a book called Think Like a White Man, and Sharan Dhaliwal, a journalist. On my side would be Alka Seghal Cuthbert, director of the campaign group Don’t Divide Us. This was nice, as I had sourced a quote from Alka in my Spectator piece, while readers will recall her appearance on the Sceptic last year on DDU’s report on the Equality Act and the problems with it.

I was the only guest joining down the line. In my first answer this may have helped, as I was able to explain at some length and without interruption that contrary to Starmer’s suggestion that Reform wanted to rip up protections going back “decades”, the “Public Sector Equality Duty” and “positive action” mean the Equality Act is a whole new ball game.

Read More: The BBC Doesn’t Want to Hear About Anti-White Discrimination