hello and welcome to political thinking, a conversation with — rather than an interrogation of — someone who's shaped our political thinking about what has shaped theirs. now, you might think that the job of the equality and human rights commission was simply to police and implement the law, to ensure equality. but in this era of so—called culture wars, debate about equality is, it seems, dividing even the commission itself. my guest this week is the chair of the equality and human rights commission, baroness kishwer falkner. she faced allegations that she had bullied her staff. allies of her insisted that she was the victim of a witch hunt from people who thought she thought the wrong things about the toxic debate about trans women and their place in society. an investigation into that bullying has recently been dropped. baroness falkner was appointed by the conservatives, but she is a former liberal democrat peer. she's also talked of herself being a first generation migrant to this country. she came here from pakistan. baroness falkner, welcome to political thinking. thank you for having me. we've been waiting months to have this conversation, you and i, because you felt it wasn't right to speak when there was this investigation into you — an investigation that has been dropped. we'll talk about some of that later. but how do you feel now? is it like a shadow�*s been lifted? nick, i think in these sort of things, people sometimes find that they're more resilient than they imagined themselves to be. but when you're actually in it, nothing you've ever heard about, in terms of anyone else�*s experience, is ever applicable to you. it's a very personal thing, and one goes through it at a very personal level. if you're lucky, you have the love and support of your family, which i've had in terms. but i think the thing that — there is some relief, of course there is — but i think the thing that i reflect upon is that there were times when i thought i had a very well constructed flak jacket, in terms of my resilience. and there were times when i thought that flakjacket became incredibly thin and i was really worried about whether one would survive the experience. on the other hand, i think... because it was so personal? yes, because it's not who you are. you don't recognise yourself. it's not who you thought you were. and it's not what you want other people to know of you. you know, nobody gets out of bed in the morning to come and upset other people. so it becomes very personal in the sense of it undermines your own view of who you are, which is... it was effectively being said on the one hand that you were a bully in the workplace and that investigation was dropped, but there was a wider charge, wasn't there? there was a sort of, you were a tory appointee in the culture war, that you'd only taken the job and you'd only been given the job to roll back the rights of trans women and other people. yes. that was the easy part. that was, you know, could be rebutted, refuted without even needing to blink. it was so untrue and remains so untrue. so that was the easy part. the difficult part was, as you said, the harassment or bullying. and any idea that that's who i am was, for me, very difficult. so let's get to the substance of what the row was about that you found yourself at the heart of. the most toxic of charges against you, which represented a much greater policy debate, was the suggestion that you referred to a trans woman as a bloke in lipstick. did you? yes, and i said so publicly. but context is everything. we were having a discussion in a board meeting about the importance of definitions, and i used that, i'd heard woman's hour announce that they were going to have an all female column. and i saw on twitter the person was being described as "a bloke in lipstick". and in the conversation that we were having, we... i referred to it in the sense that, you know, we have to be — we have no choice but to engage in these debates because if we don't, this is what the discourse comes down to. so you were quoting somebody else? yes. it was not your description? indeed, isaid. now, the reason it matters, of course, beyond the staff of the commission itself, is this much wider question for society. and the reason your appointment was controversial and arguably the reason you have been in such choppy waters is because you said to people in the commission and outside, i don't simply say trans rights are trans rights. i do not simply say that a trans woman is a woman. why was that important for you? when i was appointed, when i was being selected for the role, during the process several months beforehand, the black lives matter movement was very much to the fore and everyone was extremely concerned about race and where we were as a country on race. and it didn't escape my attention that, you know, i'm a brown skinned woman, a migrant, as you've described, and that perhaps this is what ehrc had been a little weak on. certainly in terms of that kind of diversity on the board, there wasn't sufficient amounts of it. and i thought that being an old, old—fashioned race equality campaigner from the past, being an old—fashioned feminism campaigner from the past... but i had thought that the feminism debates, my mother's generation debates, were long dead. we had sort of won — structural feminism had won out. women had equality now at a structural level. and so that hadn't much engaged me in the last ten, 20 years, whereas the race issue had come back and forth regularly. we've had a lot of legislation in this country. i was involved in some of it and i was involved in parliament on the passage of the equality act. so we thought quite a lot about that. ithought, really, that would be my preoccupation. i didn't expect trans to be there at all. i didn't know very much about it. it was on the periphery of my vision. it wasn't front and centre. but there was a case, an employment case, a tribunal, that was crucial, wasn't it, that did come up and did draw you and did draw the commission into reaching a judgment? tell us about that. yes, this was this was the forstater appeal tribunal ruling. ehrc, ithink, had been requested, t happened before i came, to support maya forstater in her first instance tribunal and i think they decided not to. this was her argument that she believed there was a tension between her rights as a woman... yes. ..and trans rights. we engaged with the fact as to whether the belief that biological sex has a definitive meaning that affects the meaning of the word "woman" was relevant to be considered as a protected characteristic under the protected characteristic of belief. in other words, that she was not just entitled to that view, but had a legal right to hold it and not be dismissed... precisely. ..because it offended other people. precisely. i don't think we had much of a discussion. i don't remember that we spent an inordinate amount of time on it because it was so self—evident that we should support the case. and we did. it seemed clear to us, as a board, that the law was sending us in a certain direction. either we protect all protected characteristics and take engagement with all of them, or we don't — even the ones that are difficult. and some people sum up their views, simply a man is a man a woman is a woman — that's just common sense. is that common sense? is that the law or is that... no. no, that isn't the law. the law, as it stands at the moment, that there is a category of people who, once they get a gender recognition certificate, are classified as legal men and legal women. for shorthand, we accept, and to respect their dignity and to have due respect to them, we absolutely respect their right to be referred to. so in the words of the slogan, in that sense, a trans woman is a woman. a trans man is a man. in that sense? no, because i think... you have to look at how sex is defined in the equality act. sex and gender are used imprecisely and as alternatives for one another in the equality act. that leads to tribunals sometimes getting it right, sometimes getting it wrong. we had found litigation going all the way up into the higher courts regularly on this basis. and we, you know, you have to scratch your head and say, why is it that there's so much litigation around this area? could it possibly be that the legislation itself is wrong? so all we've asked government to do is to have a look at the wording of the act. were you right to stick it out? do you sit here and think, thank god, or is there a bit of you that thinks i should have walked away from this? i think, as i said, my analogy of the flak jacket, i think there were very few occasions when that flak jacket was so thin that i was tempted to walk away. i had a duty to stay. i had a duty to my board to stay. i had led them into this. i had a duty to people, our stakeholders. i had a duty to the people that we were trying to advise — parliament and government. i wonder if what gave you that flak jacket that you've described was your upbringing? your parents, like many indian muslims, fled during the war of partition. they went to pakistan. you grew up in pakistan and must have been painfully aware, even at that young age, of what religious division can do to families, can do to communities, can do to countries? yes, it was incredibly painful. you know, my contemporaries, the children of my parents�* friends who were shia, were murdered in areas like baluchistan. so people that we grew up with, broke bread with, played with, died and we ourselves as a family were incredibly secular muslims in the sense that we had a very — my parents had a very modern interpretation of islam. now, you didn't come straight to england, but you did come to study here and then to stay here as a british pakistani citizen. and, of course, dealing with community tensions around religion, around — race is also part of the agenda of the commission that you chair, the equality and human rights commission. when you watch the tensions, there are now, when you look at britishjews saying "we don't feel safe on the streets", "we don't feel comfortable letting our children go into town". but you equally hear british muslims moved by the plight of what's happening in gaza and not, of course, just british muslims. i grew up in pakistan. we weren't, we weren't... you know, all we thought of in terms of israel was that it was a country that wasn't recognised on the pakistani passport. you weren't allowed to travel, you were allowed to travel to every country in the world but south africa and israel. so we didn't know very much about israel's history. but i taught myself when i came here and i was enormously privileged to actually be able to go to auschwitz and the camps in 1999. so, for me, understanding jewish people's concerns is almost intrinsic to my personality. understanding is one thing — empathy, sympathy — but you're chair of a equality commission. is it yourjob in any way, and you did write to the police in advance of the mass protests on that weekend, is it the job of the commission to say more needs to be done to protect the jewish community? or is that a decision in the end simply for the police? well, can ijust disaggregate thatjust a little bit to remind your listeners that we're the people who did over a year long investigation into the labour party in anti—semitism. we're the organisation that stood up forjewish people at a time when it was very politically difficult for us to do so. anti—semitism is a different matter and we know how to deal with that. we've dealt with it and we know how to deal with that and we will do so again if we find it necessary to do so. but having come as an adult to a country, where for the first time in my life i've had the freedom to express myself, i have the utmost, utmost regard for defending free speech. and of course, alongside that, freedom of expression is part of protesting. so we do feel ourselves obliged to ensure that everyone remembers at a time when other organisations, by the way, are under pressure, that everyone remembers that a democratic society is only as good as its minorities. and by that, i mean dissenting minorities in terms of opinions. you've talked in the past of there being a british formula, a liberal formula for how we should live together. different cultures, different races, different religions, different ethnic backgrounds. what did you mean? so, you know, sociologists sometimes refer to different models of multiculturalism. and one of them is this sort of — sociologists refer to a mixed salad. so you have a lot of different components in your salad. my argument is that the best thing about a mixed salad is its dressing. and the dressing has to be capable of being the overall binding ingredient in the salad. and that dressing in this context is our values, our common values. and i think that we're failing a little bit in integration if there are people who don't sign up to those values and that we kind of take that in a liberal shrug of the shoulders whereby, "oh, it's fine, it's all diversity. "different people live different lives" and we'lljust let it go. no, i don't believe we can let it go. i think the more diverse our country gets, the more we have to work as a society with the resources provided by government, by the way, starting from schools to ensure that there is a common vision of our society, the british values. gordon brown, i think unsuccessfully on the whole, tried to define what they are, but we all know what they are. and to be clear, you are a british, pakistani muslim immigrant saying these things. yes. now, do you go as far as suella braverman did and say multiculturalism was a misguided dogma that allowed people to live parallel lives? no. i don't. there is very little, i think, that in recent terms that i would find that is helpful to that debate and that's not a helpful way of phrasing it. i don't subscribe to that and i wouldn't go along with it. you have sometimes backed things that were seen as deeply provocative. borisjohnson said that women who wore the veil or the burka looked like they were letterboxes or that they were bank robbers. and you surprised some people in saying you thought that was an argument that should be heard. on the face of it, it wouldn't have been an article that i would have written. i still stand by the fact that sometimes we are excessively liberal in our perspectives on allowing people to live too much of the lives that they're accustomed to living, which don't take into account the cultures of the country they have come to. i say to you here, i mean, i think i'm correct in saying that early on when facemasks were made mandatory during covid, i expect... i expressed concerns back then in the lords about the security implications of allowing masked people. that's because i had very relevant direct experience in pakistan. if you try to go into a public building or a bank or a government building, and if you're wearing a full burka, you are searched, you are not allowed to do that. it's not unreasonable for a state to say if you're going on a demonstration, you should show who you are. now, i said in the introduction, not just that you're a british muslim, but you described yourself once as an economic migrant. when you hear the debate about people who are coming here any way they can, sometimes across the channel, in small boats, perhaps because they think there's no other way of getting here, is there a little bit of you that identifies with them in theirjourney and their plight? there's a big difference. and i think the big difference is, yes, i was an economic economic migrant. i was lucky enough to be — first the skills that i had to be offered a job here, and i came that way. and that is, i think, goes to the heart of the small boats matter. the issue is that we as a country let in fairly significant numbers of people into our country through legal routes. the issue isn't the route by which you arrive here so much in the public�*s concern about this. it is about whether you have arrived here fairly and squarely, through the routes we all recognise in terms of our obligations as a law abiding, internationalist country. and i think that's where the problem lies. as a lawmaker, you're a member of the house of lords, as well as chairing the equality and human rights commission. does baroness falkner feel uncomfortable with the courts being able to block an elected government's policy, or is that what the courts are for? i have huge regard for the constitution, the constitutional settlement we have here in the uk, and the separation of powers is absolutely critical to a thriving democracy. so if there are people listening or watching who are raging at the idea the supreme court has blocked a plan to stop the boats, you say what to them? we have throughout had a very consistent policy through the illegal migration act when it was a bill going through parliament till today. but we have expressed exactly the concerns that have now been found to be the unlawful act of the uk government in this legislation. so i suppose in a way, if i were putting it into shorthand, they would be a bit of schadenfreude, a bit of �*we told you so�*. we're talking a couple of hours after the supreme court has made its ruling on the rwanda scheme for processing some asylum schemes in africa rather than here and you've not had the chance to study it. but the commission has expressed views before today on this. what are the concerns you've expressed? i think our concerns were really about whether we could have been guaranteed the fairness of the process, judicial process, the fairness of the judicial process, if it were carried out by a third party. we've talked through just a couple of the very complicated, some say toxic issues that have to be handled. i wonder what your reflections are, as an immigrant who, in your own words, came here with a single suitcase, are, that you're now one of the people in charge of reaching those judgments in your adopted country? you know, it's a very sobering thought. but, in general, when one looks back at life, i think so much of success in life is luck, rather than effort. i came here from a family where my other siblings went to the us and i also had the privilege subsequently of living in france, germany and italy. so every time i reflect on my life, i try and work out what it is that is so attractive about this country rather than any of those i've mentioned. and i think it is partly that i arrived at a very lucky time, when generally the atmosphere among young people, and i was pretty young, young people was that they were embracing of others, of foreigners, of foreign cultures and things. and that has been my experience through my time, my a0 something years here. i think we're an incredibly, especially as i look at germany and france and italy, the three european countries i know best, we are in a very different way, we're a more open society. we are nonconformist. we almost seem to take a pride in our non conformism, yet that dressing, the glue that binds us, are a sort of wry smile down the pub, a bit of rolling of the eyebrows when people are... a rolling of the eyes when people say inappropriate things, butjust getting on with it. and that is what is so attractive here. my siblings live in the us, i go there frequently and i see what's happening there and hell, no, i wouldn't want to be there in a million years. baroness kishwer falkner, chair of the equality and human rights commission, thank you very much forjoining me on political thinking. thank you, it's been a privilege. equality — one word that so many people would say �*i believe in�*, and yet it's so easy to say the word and so hard to agree on what it means in practice. like in so many areas of our public life, it is tempting to say, wouldn't it be better if we took the politics out of the debate? the truth is, it's a fantasy to think you can do that. thanks for watching. hello there. we've seen two different sides to autumn over the last couple of days. friday, i'm sure you'll remember, we had lots of sunshine across the country and temperatures generally near average, although it was a bit cold in scotland. contrast that with the weather we had on saturday, where there was a lot of cloud around but it was a lot milder. temperatures in yeovilton up to 17 degrees celsius. it was also quite windy for some, for example here in west scotland. saturday's weather with all due to this area of low pressure. sunday's weather will all be due to this area of low pressure too. it's not really going anywhere very fast at all. the south—westerly winds we have at the moment will continue to feed in some fairly thick layers of cloud, thick enough to bring outbreaks of mostly light rain and drizzle, although there could be a few heavier bursts mixed in for west scotland and northern ireland at times. so we are looking at a mild start to the day on sunday. near the centre of this low pressure in scotland, it won't be too windy but in contrast to that, the winds picking up across the south coast of england and into southern wales as well. i think towards the south—west coasts, we could see gusts picking up to about a0 mph, so it will be a noticeably blowy kind of day. some further damp weather working from west to east but you do have a chance of seeing a few glimmers of sunshine pushing through the cloud at times. here's our low pressure still with us by monday, slowly slipping away into the north sea and weakening. still bringing cloud and patches of rain but again, there should be a few more brighter spells intermingled, particularly across more inland areas. although still mild, those temperatures are just starting to edge down a little bit as we head through the course of monday. heading into tuesday, we start to see a ridge of high pressure moving in off the atlantic and that should give us better breaks in the cloud, particular across scotland and northern ireland, although there could be a few mist and fog patches to start the day here. maybe one or two showers draped around coastal regions of england and wales but otherwise probably largely dry. temperatures coming down, closer to average for the time of year, about 9—12 degrees celsius for most. now, that mild weather lasting for much of the week. it will often be quite windy. towards the end of the week and next weekend, though, there is a question mark as to how far south we start to see some cooler air moving its way in. what i think we will see is a drop in temperatures and across some of the mountains of northern scotland, it could get cold enough to see some of the showers start to turn a bit wintry. live from london, this is bbc news. blasts are reported in the jabalia refugee camp. the hamas—run health authority says two schools were hit, killing at least 80 people. israeli forces say they're investigating. i can't confirm this incident is idf but we are seeing the images, like you've seen the images, on social media and we are looking into it. i can't confirm at this stage that it is idf but we are looking into it. people continue leaving al—shifa hospital on foot as tanks mobilise around them. israel denies ordering the evacuation of the hospital. and thousands of israelis are rallying outside the prime minister's residence in jerusalem. they're demanding that benjamin netanyahu's government does more to secure the release of the hostages held by hamas. welcome to bbc news, i'm lukwesa burak. the hamas—run health authorities say at least 80 people were killed in two israeli strikes on schools, in the jabalia refugee camp in northern gaza. they say one of the schools, the un—run al—fakhoura, was being used as a shelter.