Cornwall Council

And so it's important when we think about the the law in this area, to think about the circumstances where our law provides protection for transgender people.

And the first point to note about this is that the leading case that kind of establishes protection for transgender people in anti-discrimination law is a case called P&S and Cornwall County Council, which established back in 1996 that transgender people, or at least those people who are covered under the definition of gender reassignment, which is those who are proposing to undergo who are undergoing or who have undergone a process or part of a process, the purpose for which is to reassign their sex, they will be entitled not to be treated less favourably than other people by virtue of that characteristic.

So that means you can't be fired from your job being transgender or for seeking to transition.

You can't be denied service for being transgender or seeking to transition, unless there are explicit carve-outs in anti-discrimination law that might permit some forms of discrimination, but they are few and far between.

But if you want genuine dynamism in the regions of this country, you're gonna have to grant them the kind of fiscal authority that, that no prime minister and certainly no Treasury would ever allow.

So if you could imagine a world in which Cornwall Council was able to announce that from next January, corporation tax in Cornwall is 12.5%, y- you're, you're gonna see some s- dramatic changes to the economic geography of this country.

Yeah.

There'll be winners, there'll be losers.

I mean, we had a... without going into history too much.

Cornwall Council, obviously, like most councils, got stripped by austerity.

So if it wasn't a mandatory service, they just went, oh, we won't do it anymore.

And

But there was a debate about how can we work together.

Cornwall Council is different from Plymouth City Council, different to Devon Council, and up and down the country, the debate that says, how do we take power out of Whitehall and Westminster, is one that I welcome.

Because I want to see Cornwall and Plymouth and Devon working together.

But how can we make it easier for the 30% of people in Cornwall who get their health care in Plymouth? How do we make it easy for the young people who go to college in Plymouth? How do we make it easier for the businesses in Plymouth to be able to trade with Cornwall? It's the issues that I really want to get stuck in with.

It didn't stop a civil claim by his family.

And it didn't stop a criminal investigation and a criminal prosecution by Cornwall Council either.

Most people seem to think that these signs have some kind of mystical, magical powers that will, you know, maybe anti-gravitational powers or something like that.

Signs don't really prevent stuff.

As the Cornwall Council said here, look, signage alone is not an adequate control.

Proactive measures must be taken to either prevent floors becoming slippery or precluding public access.

So signs, if you're putting signs out, that's a symptom of a problem that you're not dealing with effectively.