In today’s Britain, a dangerous legal trend is taking root — one that risks unravelling decades of hard-won progress on equality.
The courts and workplace tribunals are increasingly handing victories to those who openly promote bigoted views, under the protection of belief in the Equality Act 2010.
This protection was never meant to give people free license to harass or discriminate. Yet step by step, precedent by precedent, that is exactly what is happening.
And if you want to know where this road leads, just look at Trump’s America — where this playbook is already several years ahead of us.
The ‘Belief’ Loophole
The Equality Act rightly protects people from discrimination based on religion or philosophical belief. The original purpose was sound: to protect pluralism, not to entrench prejudice.
But a string of court cases has widened this safeguard beyond what most people imagined.
- The Forstater ruling (Employment Appeal Tribunal, 2021) protected gender-critical beliefs that deny the legitimacy of trans people’s identities.
- The Bailey case extended protection to extreme gender-critical views and behaviour that created a hostile workplace environment.
- The Higgs ruling found that a teacher who promoted anti-LGBTQ+ content, including messages about same-sex relationships and trans people, was protected on the grounds of religious belief.
The cumulative effect? A legal culture in which the bar for protected beliefs is now dangerously low, while the threshold for proving harm caused by those beliefs is increasingly high.
In other words, it has become legally easier to justify discriminatory behaviour than to challenge it.
The Impact Is Already Real
This is not some theoretical legal argument. We are seeing real consequences now:
- LGBTQ+ workers are forced to tolerate open hostility from colleagues who claim protection for their views.
- Trans people being excluded, misgendered or harassed in services and employment, with their complaints dismissed as infringing others’ beliefs.
- Public bodies and employers are becoming fearful of promoting inclusive policies, lest they face belief-based litigation.
- A chilling effect on diversity and inclusion efforts across sectors.
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court’s recent ruling in For Women Scotland v Scottish Ministers has further emboldened those seeking to roll back trans inclusion under the guise of ‘protecting women’ — another front in the same battle.
Look Across the Atlantic — This Is Not Alarmism
If you think “it can’t happen here”, think again.
Trump-aligned forces in the US are pursuing this exact strategy — and they are winning. In recent months:
- DEI programmes (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) have been dismantled across public institutions.
“deny, discredit, and undermine the traditional American values of hard work, excellence, and individual achievement in favor of an unlawful, corrosive, and pernicious identity-based spoils system.”
“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people,”
- Government websites have been purged of entire pages, including words like women, while men remain untouched.
- History is being rewritten — Black and brown war heroes erased from curricula; references to the Enola Gay removed; LGBTQ+ history and healthcare advice, including life-saving HIV and AIDS resources, deleted from public resources.
- LGBTQ+ suicide support lines have been shut down, with the clear message that these lives do not matter.
This is not theory — it is happening, fast and brutally. And the same ideology is at work here, using Britain’s expanding belief-based legal shield to achieve similar ends.
And while the legal cases are quietly laying the groundwork, the political momentum is building too. Reform UK is already climbing in the polls — a party openly hostile to LGBTQ+ rights, gender equality, and anti-racism efforts. If they gain greater influence, they will mirror the exact US-style agenda we see unfolding across the Atlantic: purging DEI, rewriting history, sidelining minority voices, and turning belief-based discrimination into official policy.
Once these forces gain political power, the legal precedents we are seeing now will serve them well — a ready-made framework for rolling back rights while claiming the language of “free speech” and “protected beliefs.”
What Can Be Done?
We need urgent political leadership to stop this drift.
- Courts and tribunals must be reminded that the purpose of belief protections is to prevent discrimination, not to justify it.
- Clear legal guidance must be issued to limit belief-based defences where they infringe the dignity and rights of others.
- Parliament must urgently debate the growing misuse of this characteristic and act to preserve the core intent of equality law.
This is about the future of the UK as a genuinely inclusive society. If we do not act now, the erosion of rights will accelerate, and as we have seen in the US, reversing that damage later will be infinitely harder.
Help Us Call for Action
That is why we have launched a campaign calling on MPs to speak out now. We are urging them to take a clear stand against the growing misuse of belief protections — and to act before more harm is done.
You can help by sending a message to your MP today. We’ve made it simple — our email template explains exactly what’s at stake.
Together, we can stop this dangerous trend before it is too late.