text: I could go on, referring for instance to the recommendation that “all the original provisions of the Equality Act 2010, such as the socio-economic duty and protection from combined discrimination, should be brought into force and implemented in England, Scotland and Wales, and the Public Sector Equality Duty should be strengthened. This would maximise the potential of the Equality Act’s protections to heal those divisions in society that became acutely apparent around the EU referendum” – something you could be forgiven for thinking came straight out of a classic Guardian editorial. But you get the point: the Commission is happy to come across as an organisation whose senior management, if forced to shake hands with a Tory MP, would immediately repair to the lavatory to wash them afterwards.
  The problem is obvious: a great deal said by the Commission in its report calls seriously into question the principle of impartiality of the Civil Service. True, the Commission is strictly speaking not a ministry or department but a Blair-era statutory non-departmental body (even if, by a supreme irony, it comes under the remit of its “sponsoring body”, the Department of Education). But its employees are still civil servants, and are still bound by strict rules on lobbying, including a ban on anything party political or liable to misrepresentation as being party political. True, the report was published before the election was called: the fact remains that what it said is highly contentious in a party political sense.
  Memo to Theresa May: once the election is out of the way, there is a strong case for reining in super-outfits like this one. Impartial enforcement of the law is one thing: patent political posturing is something else. There’s nothing wrong with grandstanding and campaigning, for human rights or for that matter any other fashionable cause, good or bad. But there’s everything wrong when organisations financed by your money and mine start to get in on this particular act.