The sinister forces behind that threat to banish school skirts

Back in the Eighties, a string of Labour-run town halls were notorious for their extremism, mismanagement and financial extravagance.

Justly known as the 'Loony Left,' these authorities were epitomised by Ken Livingstone's spendthrift and dogmatic regime at the Greater London Council. Their excesses were supposed to have ended with the rise of New Labour.

But, as Gerry Adams once famously said of the IRA, the ideological extremists 'never went away'. They merely transferred their activities from the urban municipalities to the heart of government.

Thanks to the 13 years of Labour rule, lunatic Leftism now has more influence than ever. Its politically correct zealotry flourishes throughout the public sector and the quangos.

Its fixations with race and gender are written into law. Its obsession with social engineering is transforming the fabric of Britain, destroying traditional, unifying bonds such as family life and nationhood.

The fanaticism of the Left was recently exposed in guidance issued by the Equality and Human Rights Commission for public bodies on how to treat transgender people, including transvestites and those undergoing a change of sex.

In one startling passage in this 68-page document, the Commission warned it may be illegal for any school to require girls to wear skirts as part of their uniform, since this could discriminate against transsexual pupils.

Such an edict would be laughable were it not so indicative of the disturbing mindset of the equality bureaucrats who wield such control over our lives.

The threat to take legal action against schools because some uniforms can be deemed 'gender specific' is beyond satire. The number of transsexual adults in Britain is tiny, perhaps as few as 5,000, yet the Commission wants all public services to be altered for the sake of this minuscule group.

Furthermore, it is absurd to start putting these highly emotive, questionable labels on young people before they have barely passed puberty.

Such action highlights three of the most dangerous traits of the Left-wing doctrinaires. One is their remorseless focus on categorising individuals by race, gender, sexual orientation or class - and then placing them within hierarchies of victimhood according to the perceived disadvantage they have suffered.

Another is the sexualisation of children, in which the innocence of youth is destroyed by the aggressive promotion of the so-called 'sexual rights' agenda.

The third is the eagerness to obliterate all traditional morality by presenting support for normal, married family life as outmoded and discriminatory.

While warning that requiring girls to wear skirts is 'potentially unlawful', the Equality Commission document highlights, as an example of 'good practice', the real-life case of 'a young transperson born female attending a mixed-sex primary school'.

On the advice of a 'gender identity clinic' in London and the local 'lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender youth service', the school transformed its procedures to accommodate this one young child who had been 'identified as transgender' by a psychologist.

The changes including a 'gender neutral uniform' - whatever that might be - and 'a new system of lining up for class by mixed-sex group labelled using basic shapes (such as Triangles, Circles and Rectangles) rather than by gender.'

Teachers were also encouraged to use the changes as a way of 'exploring gender stereotypes'. Most parents would prefer that primary schools just teach their pupils to read and write properly rather than embarking on journeys of sexual exploration.

The Equality Commission guidance is riddled with this kind of bizarre nonsense. Public facilities are urged to install unisex toilets which are 'more welcoming' for transgender people.

Following the example of New Forest District Council in Hampshire, leisure centres are encouraged to hold sessions where transgender people have 'sole use of the swimming pool, gym, sauna and badminton courts for an evening'.

Prisons are warned against stopping hormone therapy for transgender convicts.

When speaking to transgender people, public officials are instructed 'to use the pronoun that is consistent with the person's appearance and gender expression. For example, if the person wears a dress and uses the name Susan, feminine pronouns are appropriate'.

Public bodies are further urged to 'designate a trans-equality and human rights champion among its staff' and to provide all staff 'with training on trans-equality'.

As always, the fashionable obsession with ethnicity appears. 'Young black trans men might face different issues and have very different needs compared with older white trans women,' reads one extract.

There is also a deluge of ultra-feminist drivel. 'Gender identity is subjective,' proclaims the document, contradicting almost a million years of biology.

How outrageous that we have to pay for this through our taxes. No one voted for this radical agenda or for the bureaucrats pushing through the change.

In its ruthless campaign to impose the creed of the hard Left on Britain, the Equality and Human Rights Commission, headed by Labour schmoozer Trevor Phillips, swallows £70million a year and employs 525 staff.

The quango was established in 2006 through a merger of three previous bodies: the Commission for Racial Equality, the Equal Opportunities Commission and the Disability Rights Commission.

As usual in the elitist public sector culture, where much of taxpayers' money is treated with contempt, the annual expenditure of the Equality and Human Rights Commission is almost 50 per cent higher than the total budget of all three predecessor bodies combined.

Reflecting the Commission's climate of self-indulgence, salaries have risen by 25 per cent over the past two years - this at a time of deepening recession across the country.

No fewer than 28 of the employees earn more than £50,000-a-year and three receive over £100,000.

Profligacy is endemic. The Commission squanders £ 5.5million a year on public relations and, in its first three years, spent more than £3.5million on consultants, despite a large complement of its own pen-pushers.

Ken Livingstone's GLC was infamous for the way it doled out grants to certain politically favoured groups, and the EHRC is exactly the same. The sums doled out to recent recipients from its £10million Strategic Funding Programme are eye-watering.

The Derbyshire Friend Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Special Support and Advocacy Services organisation was awarded £393,000.

The Lesbian And Gay Foundation was awarded £264,000. Women In Prison was given a grant of £280,300. Ethnic Alcohol Counselling in Hounslow received £120,000.

Travellers' groups have also done well - £114,000 has gone to the Cardiff Gypsy and Traveller Project; £150,000 to the Leeds Gypsy and Traveller Exchange; and £40,000 to the Friends, Families and Travellers in West Sussex to give them 'the confidence to participate actively in the life of the community'.

One of the largest recent grants was the £258,300 dished out to a body called The British Institute of Human Rights, which is headed by barrister Katie Ghose, who used to work for the Labour MP Greville Janner.

In her eagerness for judicial activism in support of a radical agenda, Ms Ghose is all too typical of metropolitan elite that loathes traditional Britain.

A trustee of the gay pressure group Stonewall, she has also been a leading figure in the outfit called Bail for Immigration Detainees, which campaigns against the detention of asylum seekers and migrants.

As usual with the politically correct brigade, Ghose's definition of human rights does not encompass the rights of taxpayers.

In August 2007 she wrote an incredibly patronising article in the Guardian about the decision, on human rights grounds, not to deport from Britain Learco Chindamo, the killer of the headmaster Philip Lawrence.

Ghose dismissed the public outcry over the decision as nothing more than 'hysteria' and then, turning to Lawrence's widow Frances, who had expressed her outrage, wrote: 'A more fitting legacy to her husband would be to engender a real understanding of what human rights are about.'

Interestingly, Ghose was employed as a member of the Government's task force which advised on the creation of the Equality and Human Rights Commission - the very Commission that turned out to be so generous towards her own organisation.

The Commission enjoys not just lavish funding, but also tremendous powers under a raft of legislation such as the 2000 Race Relations Amendment Act, which gives all public bodies a statutory duty to promote racial equality. The role of the EHRC will be even more influential when Harriet Harman's Equality Bill becomes law.

Harman has said the Bill will create 'a new social order'. Every office, factory, club and pub will have to submit to the ideology of the state.

The EHRC is the chosen instrument for implementing this change, as its commissars will be able to go into any workplace and carry out equality inspections and gender audits. 'We will adopt a targeted approach to private sector organisations,' warns the Commission.

There are two particularly odious aspects to the Equality Bill. One is the introduction, for the first time in British law, of positive discrimination, whereby employers in recruitment will be required to favour ethnic minorities and women, making a nonsense of the very term equality.

Second, no business will be allowed to bid for the supply of goods and services in the public sector unless it has demonstrated its commitment to multi-cultural diversity.

Given that the state sector's market is estimated to be worth more than £175billion, this rule again gives enormous power to the bureaucrats of the Commission who will check for compliance.

The overtly Left-wing nature of the Commission is reflected in its membership. Almost all the 15 Commissioners are from the politically correct nexus of public bureaucracy, trade unionism and progressive politics.

Indeed, more than half are active members of the Labour party. One especially notable Commissioner is Kay Carberry, who has been intimately involved with the Labour movement for over 20 years as a key trade unionist, particularly with the TUC.

She is also close to Peter Mandelson, who is godfather to her son. There is one Liberal Democrat on the Commission - but not a single Conservative.

Apart from the naked political bias, what is sickening about the Commission is that it hectors the rest of society while performing so dismally itself. Again, like the erstwhile GLC, the EHRC has become a byword for waste and incompetence.

In July 2009, the independent watchdog the National Audit Office severely censured the organisation for wasting almost £1million, when it re-employed seven managers who had received generous early retirement packages from the now defunct Commission for Racial Equality.

The seven were given pay-offs worth £629,300 in 2007 and then were taken back days later as consultants on fees totalling £323,700, an arrangement that the Audit Office said was 'novel and contentious', failed 'to follow proper processes' and 'did not represent value for money'.

A scathing report from independent consultants DeLoitte, who had been appointed to examine the disastrous chaos at the EHRC, agreed. In language that was deliberately toned down, the report found that the board 'does not operate against clear, consistently understood rules and a common purpose'.

DeLoitte further condemned the bias of the Commission. 'There is currently a lack of representation from the private sector and a need for representation from a broader political spectrum.'

But despite all the turmoil, Trevor Phillips remains in post. With the backing of new legislation, his quango will soon be more powerful than ever, the leading apparatchik of Harriet Harman's sinister new social order.

Schools who have the audacity to make their pupils wear skirts should be very afraid indeed.

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