Police should not be marching with Pride

Few sights are more cringe-inducing than the police trying to be liked. Whether it’s officers awkwardly grooving at Notting Hill Carnival or skipping arm-in-arm with the gender goons at Pride, such sycophantic pandering doesn’t inspire confidence – it invites ridicule. Worse still, it calls their impartiality into question. Now, thanks to a landmark High Court ruling handed down this week, police forces will have to think twice before participating in events that are perceived to be partisan.

The judgment concerns a case brought by Linzi Smith, a gender-critical lesbian and Newcastle United fan, against Northumbria Police. The same force once subjected her to a two-hour interrogation after her football club reported her to the police for social-media posts it deemed ‘transphobic’.

Smith claimed – quite sensibly – that when chief constable Vanessa Jardine joined Newcastle Pride last summer, flanked by uniformed officers, with rainbow-emblazoned police branding and even a van painted in the colours of the Pride flag, it sent a clear message: if you don’t subscribe to trans ideology, don’t expect the police to be on your side.

The court has now agreed. Mr Justice Linden has ruled that Jardine’s decision to march was ‘irrational’, noting that overt support for slogans like ‘trans liberation’ risks undermining public confidence in the police’s impartiality. In his judgment, he writes: ‘The fact that the officers had publicly stated their support for transgender rights by taking part in the 2024 march would be likely to give the impression that they may not deal with the matter fairly and impartially… It is not hard to imagine circumstances in which the officers in question might be called on to deal with a clash between gender-critical people and supporters of gender ideology, and therefore situations where the former had cause for concern as to whether they were being dealt with impartially.’

Speaking after the ruling, Smith said the force had ‘abandoned their duty of impartiality and embraced a highly controversial political cause. Their participation in the Pride march clearly shows where their sympathies lie.’

Smith is right. Pride really is a highly contentious cause, which the police should have no business supporting. It is no longer a march for gay rights or equality. On the contrary, the gender ideology it promotes is deeply homophobic.

Modern Pride is especially hostile towards lesbians – or at least those who insist they are only attracted to women and not transwomen (ie, men who claim to be women). Back in 2018, Manchester Pride speaker Anthony Cooper infamously said on stage that lesbians protesting against the erasure of same-sex attraction should ‘be dragged off by their saggy tits’. His statement drew cheers from the crowd.

Today, banning so-called TERFs is standard practice, even at sleepy small-town Pride events. In the Gloucestershire town where I grew up, men in rubber dog masks are paraded on leads, while kids are getting their faces painted. But if you dare to say, ‘Men aren’t women’, you’ll be branded a bigot and kicked out.

Pride, once a protest with purpose, has morphed into something grotesque: a giant, rainbow-striped cock, wielded by activists and waved in the public’s face. Flinch even slightly, and you’ll be beaten over the head with it for wrongthink.

The days when gay men were criminalised for who they loved are thankfully over. Lesbians are no longer at risk of having their children seized by social services. Yet many of today’s institutions, in a clumsy effort to atone for past wrongs, risk repeating them. This is how a supposedly enlightened, progressive police force can end up interrogating women like Linzi Smith for daring to say a lesbian is a woman who’s attracted to other women.

The police’s job isn’t to be liked – it’s to enforce the law. We don’t need officers prancing around at Pride events in a desperate bid to win approval from activists who, more often than not, resent their presence anyway. Whether it’s kneeling at BLM rallies or waving trans flags at Pride, this kind of grovelling demeans a public institution that should rise above political fads – not roll over for them.

Thanks to this ruling, an important boundary has been established: officers may still hold their beliefs, but they’ll have to keep their ideological privates zipped up while in uniform. It’s a plodding, overdue step in the right direction – a win not just for gender-critical campaigners, but also for anyone who believes that justice should be blindfolded, not wrapped in a rainbow flag.

Jo Bartosch is a journalist campaigning for the rights of women and girls.