If You Tolerate This

Ethan Shone writes:

More than a hundred thousand retired miners who expected their pensions to rise by up to 20% next month have been left with no timetable for the payment, after a last-minute Treasury U-turn that senior Labour sources say left the prime minister “furious”. openDemocracy understands the government may now be unable to transfer the funds it promised until next year – a delay that means thousands of miners could pass away without ever seeing the money. When British Coal was privatised in 1994, the government agreed to guarantee the two primary miners' pensions if the funds they had been paying into ever fell into deficit. In exchange, the Treasury demanded 50% of any investment surplus.

The funds performed well enough that the government never had to pay a penny into them, but still got access to the reserves. Miners have lost out on more than £4.4bn as a result, according to the National Union of Mineworkers. As chancellor, Rachel Reeves released the funds for the British Coal Staff Superannuation Scheme, whose members were generally better-paid, non-mining staff. Based on assurances from ministers, campaigners and coalfield MPs expected that Healey would do the same for the Mineworkers’ Pension Scheme this week, freeing up more than £1bn according to MPs’ estimates.

But in a meeting on Tuesday, Treasury officials told the trustees the money would not be released after all, blaming government accounting rules. Senior Labour sources told openDemocracy that Andy Burnham was “blindsided” by the decision, which he and Healy “clashed” over. The Treasury did not directly comment on these allegations, and Downing Street had not responded to our questions at the time of publication.

Burnham made the dispute part of his Makerfield by-election campaign earlier this year, pledging to “keep fighting” to make sure “every penny reaches the people it is meant for”. Believing the deal would be signed off at the Budget, trustees of the Mineworkers’ Pension Scheme (MPS) had lined up a bonus to be added to members’ December pension payments, following months of negotiations with ministers, coalfield MPs, and the National Union of Mineworkers.

The pension boost would have been funded by the government renouncing its claim to the scheme's guarantor's fund, and would not have cost the taxpayer anything. Now, the former miners have been left with no timetable for payment. The MPS estimates that more than 5,000 of its members, many of whom are ageing and suffer health problems related to their former profession, pass away every year. Any delay means many more pensioners will never see the additional funds they were promised.

The National Union of Mineworkers understands that the remaining funds can only be released at a fiscal event such as a Budget. If correct, this would likely mean the earliest money can be released will now be well into next year. Chris Kitchen, the NUM’s general secretary, told openDemocracy: “We're frustrated that money that could be used to mitigate cost of living pressures and benefit the country now is still locked up, doing no good for anybody.”

The Treasury would not respond to openDemocracy’s questions on what prompted the last-minute U-turn. Instead, it pointed only to remarks the prime minister made earlier this week: “Nothing's gone wrong. The commitment is in no way diminished.” In the interview cited by the Treasury, Burnham added that the Budget “didn’t give us all of the room for manoeuvre that we would have wanted”, and that the fund “does have to be scored on the public balance sheet and that is part of the challenge that we've got”.

‘Heard loud and clear’

When he made his first conference speech as chancellor in Liverpool last month, Healey referred throughout to a miner’s lamp that sits on a shelf in his home. “Those miners,” he said, “didn’t just use their lamps to light their own steps, they shone them to help others.” But as he drained his pint at the Two Chairmen pub in Westminster on Wednesday evening, celebrating his first Budget in traditional style, many of his Labour colleagues’ inboxes were filling up with angry correspondence from those same miners. Labour activists canvassing in coalfield constituencies in the days after the Budget told openDemocracy the issue has already come up frequently on the doorstep, and the party’s coalfield MPs have since engaged in three days of fierce lobbying of the Treasury, both in public and behind the scenes.

On Friday afternoon, Labour whips sent the party’s MPs a briefing promising to meet with coalfield MPs “in the coming weeks” – but set out no date for releasing the money. The briefing, which openDemocracy has seen, said that Healey, chief secretary to the Treasury Emma Reynolds and reindustrialisation minister Blair McDougall had “heard loud and clear the representations” and would work with MPs, trustees and the National Union of Mineworkers “to find a resolution”.

But this resolution may come too late for many former miners. In a letter sent to his MP and shared with openDemocracy, a retired miner from Yorkshire asked: “Are we seriously expected to believe that an accounting problem significant enough to prevent the agreement being implemented was not identified until the final hours before the Budget?” “Many MPS members are now elderly. Some will never live to benefit from another pension increase if these delays continue,” he added. “Blaming accounting rules at the very last moment is simply not good enough.”

Jon Trickett, the MP for Normanton and Hemsworth, was among the coalfield MPs who lobbied No 10, the Treasury and the whips on the eve of the Budget. “The apparent last-minute decision by the chancellor to make changes to the miners’ pension promise has sparked anger and puzzlement in the coal mining areas I represent,” he told openDemocracy. “Whilst I wholly welcome the good intentions of the Prime Minister, people are telling me that it’s time to deliver what was promised, sooner rather than later. I will continue to press hard for an immediate decision. Nothing less will do.”

In his Budget speech on Wednesday, Healey did end the 50:50 split of future surpluses between the government and members, telling MPs: “For ex-mineworkers, I'm guaranteeing that every penny of the pension fund surplus now goes to miners. I know the job’s not done, and I will go on to ensure the full transfer of the guarantors' fund.” The chancellor also abolished the “standstill” rule, under which bonus pensions could be frozen if the scheme fell into deficit. But, unlike the release of the guarantor’s fund, neither of these measures will put extra money in former miners’ pockets before the end of the year. “The money in the MPS guarantors fund is not taxpayers’ money,” the NUM said in a statement on Wednesday. "It is the remaining ill-gotten gains from an unfair system put in place that has penalised members of the MPS for the last 31 years.”

‘Second-class deal’

The trustees say the accounting explanation is hard to square with last year’s decision to transfer £2.3bn to members of the British Coal Staff Superannuation Scheme, which covers non-mining staff from the industry and already pays higher pensions. Gary Saunders, chair of the MPS trustees, said they were “very disappointed” that the chancellor had decided “just hours before the Budget announcement” not to go ahead, “even though a deal had been worked on extensively by both sides for months and was ready to sign”.

“What is hard to understand is how members of the MPS have been left with a second-class deal compared to the higher pensioned members in the British Coal Staff Superannuation Scheme,” he said. Allen Young, speaking for the scheme’s elected trustees, said: “One month ago, the Chancellor said that miners’ lamps are a symbol of hope, but today he confirmed that there is still no light at the end of the tunnel for MPS members.” The Treasury’s Emma Reynolds has defended the package. “This government has done more than any other government to do right by our mineworkers,” she told PoliticsHome after the budget. “We still have the outstanding issue of the guarantor's fund, which we're working closely with Labour MPs on.”

And for what were the miners fighting? How ecofeminist would Britain have become if they had won? Would Green councillors, from Kirsty Knight in Peterborough to David Hawley in St Helens, be welcomed into all other parties without the slightest suggestion that their views had changed? But directly because the miners were defeated, Paul Knaggs has to write:

Ask yourself what remains of private life when a father can be investigated, and threatened with five years in prison, for telling his daughter that she is a girl. That is not a rhetorical flourish. It is what the draft Conversion Practices Bill, published in June and now before a joint committee of both Houses, makes possible. Ministers have wrapped it in the softest language of modern virtue. They speak of dark rituals, quack therapists and cruelty to the young, and nobody sane defends any of those things. But a minister’s language does not go before a Crown Court judge. The statute does, and this statute does not stop at the clinic door or the prayer meeting. It walks straight into the kitchen.

Olivia Bailey, the minister who steered the draft into Parliament, assured the public that the bill “is not about policing how parents parent.” In the same interview, she confirmed there would be no “carve-out” for parents. Where the line falls between a loving parent and a criminal one, she said, is for the courts to decide, not politicians. So a mother will find out where the line was only after the police have crossed it. No father stands in the dock yet, because the bill is not yet law. Every prime minister since Theresa May has promised it. Keir Starmer’s government published the draft, and Andy Burnham’s has inherited it. It would apply to everyone in England and Wales: parents, teachers, youth workers, pastors and counsellors, not only therapists. It creates an offence of carrying out an abusive conversion practice, a second of encouraging one abroad, and a third of breaching a new civil order designed to stop one before it happens. Ministers will say it is only a draft. That is exactly why it must be fought now, before there is a first case.

A LAW IN SEARCH OF A CRIME

There is a real history here, and the left should own it. Within living memory, the NHS tried to cure gay men with electric shocks and drugs that made them vomit. Some congregations still try to pray homosexuality out of teenagers. A movement that believes in the dignity of ordinary people should want every trace of that driven out of British life, and this paper does. But almost everything that made that history cruel is already a crime: assault, actual bodily harm, false imprisonment, threats, and coercive control. Asked to show the gap, the government has struggled. As Sonia Sodha has pointed out, its impact assessment gives no clear examples of abusive conduct that current law fails to reach.

What it offers instead is arithmetic. Baroness Cash told peers it claims a benefit of £783 million, on the assumption that the law will prevent 100 per cent of conversion practices. Baroness Cash then dismantled that arithmetic before peers, exposing the rotten foundations of the government’s entire case. The bill’s claimed economic benefit of £783 million rests on two preposterous assumptions: first, that the legislation will prevent 100 per cent of conversion practices; second, that exactly 38 per cent of those saved will also avoid depression, a figure lifted from an American study that was never peer-reviewed. The underlying estimate of 75,000 to 93,000 victims relies on a Stonewall survey claiming that 10 per cent of LGBT people have undergone an exorcism, an absurd measure that would imply 24,600 gay exorcisms in this country every year. Against all that, the bill’s costs amount to 45 minutes of training per police officer. Departments are bound by the Treasury’s Green Book rule against cherry-picking data; Cash told peers this document fails that test. “One might laugh,” she said, “if only it were not so gravely serious.”

The minister, Olivia Bailey, had told MPs it was “beholden on us all to ensure that this conversation is based on real facts”. Her real facts came from a report by the charity Galop, which she said contained hundreds of case studies of abuse happening now. It identified fewer than 200 cases, and only 51 of those people were seeking help specifically with conversion practices. Galop’s own researchers conceded that the abuses they found already matched existing crimes, from actual bodily harm and rape to forced marriage and coercive control. What the minister did not mention was that Galop had run a helpline for the government, funded to the tune of £360,000 over three years. The government’s star witness was its own contractor.

So what is genuinely new? Two words: “transgender identity”. The draft writes this concept into criminal statute, defines it loosely enough to include people who identify as “neither male nor female”, and makes trying to change it a potential crime. It is worth being clear about what that concept claims, because it is often blurred with something quite different. Sexual orientation concerns whom a person is attracted to. A transgender identity, as its advocates define it, makes a different claim altogether: that a person can be born in the wrong body, with an inner sense of self at odds with their sex. The distress some young people feel is real and deserves care. But the explanation offered for it is a belief, not a biological fact. Humans, like every other mammal, are male or female, and no feeling, however sincere, can change which. The Supreme Court confirmed last year that in the Equality Act, sex means biological sex.

That distinction is the key to what has gone wrong for gay children. A teenage girl who finds herself attracted to other girls, and uncomfortable with the femininity expected of her, may be told that her discomfort proves she is really a boy. A gentle, effeminate boy may be told he is really a girl. Their feelings are taken as the truth about their bodies, when it should be the other way round. Children at that age are often confused, and confusion is not a diagnosis. It is exactly the moment when they most need a parent’s steady guidance: someone who will tell them that their body is not a mistake, that there is nothing wrong with being gay, and that nothing needs to be decided in a hurry. This bill makes that guidance risky.

Here the bill turns on the very children it claims to protect, and the evidence comes from the state’s own reviewers. The Cass Review listed struggles with emerging sexual orientation among the possible drivers of gender distress, and told clinicians to explore a young person’s developing sexuality rather than ignore it. Cass’s interim report criticised the Tavistock’s gender service for a “predominantly affirmative, non-exploratory approach”, and the service has since been closed. The Charity Commission found the charity Mermaids mismanaged, and told it that any future chest-binding policy must follow Cass on involving parents. Telling a lesbian teenager that she is really a boy is, in the most literal sense, an attempt to change her sexual orientation. On paper, this bill could reach the adults who do it. In practice, nobody expects the complaints to run that way. A ban sold as protection for gay children risks shielding the newest method of talking them out of being gay.

SCRUTINY IN NAME ONLY 

The committee examining the bill is chaired by Alex Barros-Curtis, Labour MP for Cardiff West, who has pressed ministers in the Commons on getting the ban done. Before entering Parliament in 2024, he was Labour’s executive director of legal affairs, and was described as effectively running the unit that handled complaints against members. Rosie Duffield, now an independent MP, says that unit investigated her for thirteen months over a single “like” on a single tweet, one of hundreds of members she says were pursued for gender-critical views. She has no seat on the committee. Burnham dropped Barros-Curtis from government in his cull of Starmer loyalists, and he was then given the job of scrutinising this bill. A committee chair should be an impartial scrutineer, not a handmaiden to the legislation he is meant to examine.

WHAT THE BILL WOULD DO TO A FAMILY 

The draft lists the forms abuse can take, among them psychological pressure, emotional pressure and economic pressure. No violence is required. Raising a distressed adolescent means confiscating phones, cutting pocket money, refusing to buy a breast binder and refusing to sanction hormones bought online. Every one of those acts can be described as pressure, and every one is meant to stop a child taking a path the parent believes will harm them. Under this bill, that purpose is the prosecution’s case, not the parent’s defence. No malice need be shown. The only intention the law asks about is the intention to change an identity. A mother protecting her autistic son or daughter from an irreversible medical pathway has no defence that she acted in her child’s best interests. Parliament knows how to write one. The offence of controlling or coercive behaviour excludes parents managing children under sixteen. That exclusion was left out of this bill, and the minister has told us it was deliberate.

Defenders point to the harm threshold: serious harm, or serious distress that substantially affects daily life. But such complaints are never built from one row over dinner. They are built from a catalogue of months of being “pressured”, “belittled” and “misunderstood”, with every refusal recast as a wound. The relationship between a parent and a child should rest on trust. It should be a place where anything can be said at the kitchen table, where a confused teenager can tell their mother what they are feeling and hear an honest answer, without either of them fearing what comes next. This bill poisons that. The parent learns to weigh every word against how it might sound in a police interview. The child learns that a complaint can end any argument. Where there was conversation, there is calculation, and then silence. The children who lose most are those who most need an honest adult to talk to.

THE THOUGHT POLICE AT THE KITCHEN TABLE 

No one is suggesting the bill makes thought itself a crime. Orwell’s warning was subtler. What a person meant when they spoke becomes the business of the state. Was a father’s refusal a parent’s judgment, or an attempt to change an identity? Only an investigation can settle that, and investigating it means questioning the child, the siblings, the school, the GP and the family’s messages. Ministers insist that the bill’s language draws on settled law on coercion. It does, but it leaves the safeguards behind. The draft lists its factors, then leaves courts to decide abuse from “all the circumstances”. Orwell warned in 1946 that political vocabulary can “give an appearance of solidity to pure wind”. Can an ordinary parent know in advance where lawful conduct ends? Bailey’s two answers, that parents are untouched and that parents get no exemption, cannot both be relied on.

If ordinary parenting is safe, the bill should say so. It does not. The punishment starts long before any verdict. Sex Matters interviewed thirty mental-health professionals who work with gender-distressed young people, and some said they would leave the field rather than risk being accused. Parents have no field to leave. A conviction breaks a family; an acquittal often breaks it anyway, because trust does not survive a police interview. The government’s own explanatory notes complain that some existing offences cannot be committed in a private dwelling. They see the front door as a loophole to be closed.

ORDERS AT THE BREAKFAST TABLE

Nor does the threat depend on the police or the council. The bill lets anyone bring a private prosecution without the consent of the Director of Public Prosecutions or the Attorney General. Baroness Cash warned peers that this would allow “privately funded campaign groups, such as the Good Law Project”, to destroy the lives of those they disagree with. The bill also creates conversion practice protection orders. The young person, the police or a local authority can apply as of right, and anyone else can apply with the court’s permission. A family judge can make one in the middle of a divorce. It can be imposed where abuse is merely “likely”; it may contain any requirement the court thinks appropriate, and breaching it carries two years in prison. 

The draft never mentions pronouns, and it does not need to. In Swindon, the maths teacher Kevin Lister wanted a pupil’s parents consulted before he adopted the pupil’s new name and pronouns. He was sacked, then barred from working with children, a ruling he is appealing. That is how the institutions around the family court already treat such refusals. The order instructing a father to use his son’s chosen pronouns at breakfast is the predictable next step. Families in the North East need no lessons in what happens when agencies are handed sweeping powers and total certainty. In Cleveland in 1987, 121 children were removed from their homes on the strength of a test later discredited, and after the Butler-Sloss inquiry 94 of them went home. Local authorities wielded those powers then. Under this bill, local authorities will be among the bodies that can apply for these orders as of right.

THE SHIELD OF THE PREDATOR 

The bill is at its most dangerous here. Grooming, whether sexual, criminal or ideological, begins by separating a child from their parents. The child is told that mother and father do not understand them, that home is hostile, and that only the new friend online truly sees them. The grooming-gang scandals showed how parents who tried to intervene were disbelieved while their children were drawn away. No case under this bill exists yet, because the bill does not. But anyone can see what it hands to the adult whispering through a fourteen-year-old’s locked phone. If the mother takes away the phone, or refuses to pay for a binder or testosterone ordered online, the mother faces the police. The groomer only has to teach the child the vocabulary of complaint, the coaching Sodha has warned about.

Ministers will reply that the definition cuts both ways, so the groomer is liable too. But the complaint comes from the child, and it lands on the parent. Private clinics are sheltered by a healthcare exemption that covers unregulated providers unless their care falls “far below” acceptable standards. The clinic is protected, the groomer is invisible, and the parent is in the dock. Mims Davies MP reminded the Commons of what happened when professionals were frightened into silence over the grooming gangs: safeguarding must never be sacrificed to ideology.

THE CHOICE THAT REMAINS 

In 1604, an English court declared that a person’s house is their “castle and fortress”. The principle has survived four centuries of governments, because it rests on a simple idea: the state must justify every step it takes across the threshold. This bill reverses that burden. It also strips away traditional legal safeguards, handing the power of private prosecution to ideological campaign groups like the Good Law Project without requiring consent from the Director of Public Prosecutions or the Attorney General.

If the pictures accompanying this column look like a dystopia that does not exist, that is precisely why they are there. Orwell did not write Nineteen Eighty-Four as a prophecy. He wrote it as a warning. He said he did not believe such a society would necessarily arrive, only that something resembling it could. A warning is issued so that it never has to come true. This bill is not yet that world, but it is a door into it. It is still a draft, so it can still be stopped. The joint committee should recommend that sexual orientation and gender identity be dealt with separately, each on its own evidence. It must insist on a statutory defence for parents who act in their child’s best interests, mandatory DPP consent before any prosecution can proceed, and the abolition of protection orders that turn domestic disagreement into contempt of court. Readers should tell their MPs, and the committee, exactly that.

Then the decision passes to Andy Burnham. He inherited this bill and he can still rewrite it. The front door was never a loophole. For a frightened child, it may be the last line of defence, and the prime minister must now decide whether his government will be the one that takes it down. The state that claims to protect your child by policing your kitchen table has not banished coercion; it has simply claimed the monopoly on it.