Here Is An Inconvenient Truth

Paul Knaggs writes:

How many times does a political party have to expel the same woman before we stop calling it discipline and start calling it what it is?

The Green Party boasts that it is the only party in Britain without a whip. Its members, we are told, are free. Yet step inside its committee rooms and you find something closer to a medieval consistory court: solemn procedures, appointed inquisitors, and one central question. Not what did you do, but what do you believe?

Emma Bateman joined the Green Party in 2009. She served three terms as Co-Chair of Green Party Women, elected and re-elected by the women she represented. She was, by any honest description, exactly the kind of member a party claims to want. She had one flaw. She would not say things she did not believe.

Her troubles began with a question. In 2021 she asked whether the other Co-Chair of Green Party Women, Kathryn Bristow, was biologically female. For this she received the first of her suspensions, a “no fault” suspension in the party’s own soothing language, as though she had been quarantined rather than accused. The following year brought another, after she warned that people described as “gender variant” were being permitted to stand for the women’s committee, and defended single-sex spaces.

Then came the fairies. At Speakers’ Corner in March 2022, Bateman asked how far her fellow Greens would prostrate themselves before what she called the pronoun police, coined the phrase “cognitive cis-connance,” and mocked the suggestion that “a person with fairy pronouns literally dies” whenever someone says men are not women. She also read out the party’s own policy on trans identity, and a disciplinary panel later recorded, in a sentence a grown adult wrote down and signed, that she had done so “in a clearly overtly sarcastic fashion.” Her remarks about “fae/faer” pronouns, the pronouns of mythical beings, were found to be “clearly antagonistic” and a breach of the party’s rules on welcoming diversity.

Stop and look at what is actually being described here. A British political party convened a formal hearing, took evidence, and produced a written finding against a 58-year-old woman for sarcasm. Not for harassment. Not for abuse. For declining to be solemn about another adult’s conviction that they are a fairy.

This was Emma Bateman’s heresy, and the party has been trying to burn her for it ever since. Expelled in January 2023, on a complaint from two senior party figures who accused her of “making trans people feel unwelcome.” Reinstated that March. Expelled again in May. Reinstated again in November. Expelled a third time in February 2024, on the same complaint. Three times they have lit the fire. Twice she has walked out of it. By the ancient logic of the ducking stool, that settles the matter: the innocent sink, and only a witch survives. The third pyre is now a matter for the courts.

It is an old rule of heresy trials that silence is never enough. The heretic must affirm. She must say the bread is flesh, the emperor is divine, the man is a woman, the colleague is a fairy. The words are the point, because a person who can be made to say what she knows to be false has been broken, and a broken person is a safe person. Bateman would not say the words. Everything since has followed from that refusal.

The Process Is the Punishment 

Her solicitor is Elizabeth McGlone of Didlaw, the lawyer who won Dr Shahrar Ali’s case against the same party. In the campaign film released on 1 July, McGlone sets out the claims. Direct discrimination because of Bateman’s gender critical beliefs. Indirect discrimination because of her beliefs and her sex. And victimisation, which in plain English means that when Bateman complained about being discriminated against, the party punished her for complaining. The claim alleges that the party failed to investigate her complaints, failed to handle the complaints against her fairly, ignored its own disciplinary rulebook, and expelled her anyway.

“It’s scary,” McGlone says in the film, “because actually the disciplinary process has been used as a form of harassment.”

The labour movement knows this story in its bones. An internal machinery built to protect members is captured by a faction and turned against them. The complaint becomes the sentence. Whether a case ever reaches a verdict hardly matters, because the verdict was never the point. The years under suspension, the isolation, the emails that go unanswered while your name sits beneath a cloud: that is the punishment, and it is inflicted long before anything is proved. The inquisition, it is worth remembering, rarely needed the stake. The process did the work.

None of this happened to one woman alone. Fourteen members of the Scottish Greens, some with forty years of service, were expelled for signing a declaration stating that sex is a biological reality. Green Party Women itself was disaffiliated and cut off from its own membership lists after allowing the subject to be discussed. And as we reported when the party’s leaked legal dossier surfaced, the Green Party of England and Wales dismisses a unanimous Supreme Court while its own lawyers warn in writing that its disciplinary conduct is indefensible. Bateman’s case is not an aberration within that story. It is the story, reduced to a single life.

The Party That Cannot Claim Ignorance

Since 2021, when the Employment Appeal Tribunal ruled in Maya Forstater’s case, it has been settled law that gender critical beliefs are protected under the Equality Act 2010: worthy of respect in a democratic society, in the tribunal’s now famous phrase. In January 2024 the social worker Rachel Meade won her case against Westminster Council and her own regulator, which had pursued her over gender critical Facebook posts. The same month, Professor Jo Phoenix won against the Open University. The law was not obscure. It was in the newspapers.

Then came the case the Green Party cannot pretend it never read, because it was the defendant. On 9 February 2024, Judge Hellman ruled that the party had subjected its former deputy leader, Dr Shahrar Ali, to unlawful discrimination because of his protected gender critical belief. The judgment found his removal as spokesperson procedurally unfair: the executive had sacked him for breaching a code of conduct without ever identifying a single breach. He was awarded £9,100, and the party was later ordered to pay £90,000 towards his costs. It was the first protected belief judgment against a British political party. The party responded by acknowledging “procedural shortfalls” and apologising for failing to live up to expected standards.

The Green Party’s War on Reality: Why Biology is Not a ‘Fantasy’ 

Note the date, because the date matters. The party expelled Emma Bateman for the third time in the first week of February 2024, days before that judgment came down. It threw her out while the court was preparing to rule against it, in a case built on the same beliefs, the same machinery, the same party. Bateman had sat through all five days of Ali’s hearing; she wrote afterwards of her astonishment at the paucity of the party’s defence. The party, evidently, learned nothing from its own trial.

And everything since has been done in the full glare of knowledge. After the judgment, the party did not reinstate her. It briefed lawyers against her instead, applying in February 2025 to strike out parts of her claim. In September 2024, the very month it was ordered to pay Ali’s costs, it excluded Ali from the party altogether, citing the same beliefs; his new crowdfunder is titled, with grim accuracy, “Groundhog Day.” In April 2025 the Supreme Court confirmed unanimously that sex in the Equality Act means biological sex. In December came the leaked dossier: the party’s own commissioned advice warning of a serious risk of unlawful discrimination, and of disciplinary actions that appeared driven by individual hostility to gender critical beliefs. At every fork in the road since February 2024, the Green Party has chosen to fight the women rather than read its own legal advice.

Ignorance was the defence in 2024. There is no ignorance left to plead. What remains is defiance: an institution that has decided the law is optional when the law is inconvenient to its internal theology.

The Honest Case for the Defence 

The party deserves to have its best argument stated fairly, so here it is. Political parties are voluntary associations with the right, indeed the duty, to hold members to standards of conduct. Nobody is entitled to be rude without consequence. Trans members of the Green Party are entitled to take part in political life without harassment. And the party’s findings against Bateman were, on their face, findings about conduct rather than belief: her sarcasm was “antagonistic,” her tone breached the rules on welcoming diversity. If it truly was her behaviour on trial and not her convictions, the party acted within its rights. That is the defence, and it is not a stupid one.

But it is exactly the defence the courts have learned to see through. The tribunal in Rachel Meade’s case confronted the same move: an institution insisting it was punishing the manner of expression, never the belief itself. It did not survive scrutiny there, and it should not survive it here, because a conduct rule that only ever catches one side of an argument is not a conduct rule. It is a belief test wearing a conduct costume. In the Green Party, sarcasm about neopronouns is an expellable offence, while Bateman’s account, which the Telegraph invited the party to dispute and it did not, is that she was called a bigot and a fascist on party forums and her complaints went nowhere. A party genuinely policing tone does not need three attempts to expel one woman over a single complaint. A party genuinely policing tone does not have its own lawyers warning, in writing, that hostility to a protected belief appears to be driving its disciplinary decisions.

There is a deeper hypocrisy beneath the legal one. The Green Party’s entire moral claim rests on respect for material reality, on telling hard truths about the physical world whether or not they are convenient. Bateman herself has made the point that the party’s stance on sex undermines its credibility on climate science, and she is right. You cannot campaign to save nature while declaring war on human biology. A party that demands we follow the science on carbon cannot excommunicate members for following it on sex. 

Then there is the money. According to reporting on the leaked dossier, the party spent around £190,000 fighting these cases in 2024 and has set aside £350,000 more. That is subscription money, taken from members and spent defending the party’s treatment of its own activists. An organisation that does this has ceased to operate as a democratic association. It has become an ideological protection racket, and the members are paying for their own prosecution.

Our Mothers and Our Grandmothers 

There is a line in the campaign film that does more work than the rest of it put together. “Our mothers and our grandmothers fought for these rights, and we have to stand up for them.”

The women the party keeps expelling are not entryists, and they are not reactionaries. They are, in the main, exactly what Bateman is: veterans of the left who believe that politics begins with material reality, that women are oppressed on the basis of their sex, and that rights written into the Equality Act in 2010 were not written to be defined out of existence by internal party committees. These were mainstream positions in every left party in Britain within living memory. Nothing about them changed. What changed is the price of holding them.

Bateman is 58. She has been suspended, reinstated, expelled and re-expelled by a party she served for more than a decade. It would have been easier to walk away, and plenty have: fourteen in Scotland alone. She stayed. Asked whether the party might one day admit its mistake, she gave the answer of a woman who has taken the full measure of the institution she is fighting. The Green Party, she said, “will be the last party to ever acknowledge that what’s gone on is wrong.”

Her case is crowdfunded, pound by pound, by ordinary people. At the time of writing, more than 600 of them have pledged over £18,000 towards a £40,000 target. Set that against the party’s six-figure legal war chest and the mismatch is itself the argument: on one side, an institution spending its members’ money to defend a purge; on the other, a woman asking the public to help her test that purge against the law of the land. If you believe political parties should answer to the Equality Act like everyone else, you can support her case at CrowdJustice. We rarely ask our readers to fund anything but this publication. We are asking now.

The Greens like to say they are the party of science, of evidence, of inconvenient truth. Very well. Here is an inconvenient truth, established in evidence, before a judge: this party has already been found to have discriminated unlawfully against one member for gender critical beliefs. Emma Bateman intends to prove it never stopped.

A party that expels the same woman three times for a belief the courts protect is not enforcing its rules. It is manufacturing the evidence against itself, one expulsion at a time.