The ‘paraglider girls’ ruling last week has thrown long-standing questions about judicial impartiality in Britain into sharp relief. On Tuesday, three women convicted of appearing to show support for Hamas by displaying paraglider images were let off virtually scot-free by a judge, Tan Ikram, who had previously handed down jail sentences for private WhatsApp memes.

When it emerged that three weeks before Ikram had liked an anti-Israel post on LinkedIn (he says accidentally), concern about his perceived leniency toward the ‘paraglider’ girls soon turned to outrage.

Former Home Secretary Suella Braverman called the light sentencing (each of the women received a 12-month conditional discharge) ‘utterly shocking’. Two Jewish groups have now complained to the Judicial Conduct Investigations Office about Judge Ikram, and the CPS is considering seeking a judicial review of his ruling.

Ikram’s impartiality has been called into question by his LinkedIn post, as well as his past boasting about handing down stiff sentences to a police officer while endorsing fashionable pieties about police racism. But we should not lose sight of the fact that the issue of judicial impartiality in Britain – and Ikram’s involvement in it – goes far beyond an allegedly errant ‘like’ on social media.

As I noted in December, ‘he and his ideas are in truth embedded in the British judicial establishment’. Since 2004, as a Deputy Lead Diversity and Community Relations Judge, he has led 150 judges engaged in ‘diversity work’. Such work is important to Ikram: before it was deleted, his LinkedIn profile announced his ‘particular interest in diversity and inclusion within the public service’, while at the 2022 New Year Honours he was given a CBE for ‘services to judicial diversity’. Ikram is currently at the start of a three-year appointment to the judicial appointments commission, the body that decides who becomes Britain’s judges. And perhaps most importantly, when these judges are appointed, they will each be given a copy of the Equal Treatment Bench Book (ETBB). This advises judges on how best to uphold the ‘fundamental principle’ of the judicial oath, ‘fair treatment’. Tan Ikram has been a contributor to the ETBB since it underwent a major revision in 2018.

Much of the Equal Treatment Bench Book is unobjectionable. It advises judges, for example, on the best way to treat the deaf, vulnerable people and children in court. But it is also an example of how contested ideologies are laundered into our public life through politically unaccountable bodies.

For instance, the gender-critical campaign group Sex Matters has long called for reform of the ETBB on the basis that it is ‘ideologically biased’ towards transgender ideology. As its 2022 report on the ETBB notes, concepts such as ‘gender identity’, gender being ‘assigned at birth’ and ‘non-binary’ have appeared in the guidance ‘without warning judges that these are claims based on a contested ideology’.

It has long been clear that the tenets of transgender ideology are having an influence on the justice system. Perhaps the most striking example of this is when trans-identified males in the dock for sexual offences are referred to by the court as ‘she’ – undoubtedly a galling experience for alleged victims. In doing this, courts are following the ETBB’s injunction to ‘[show] respect for a person’s gender identity’.

Sex Matters also showed that the legal system is using the ETBB not just as guidance, but law. Not only have judges relied on the ETBB to establish a substantive point at trial, this has been done ‘without putting the book before the parties and their representatives in open court’ – as if the document were holy writ.

Which makes it all the more worrying that the ETBB has also clearly been influenced by many fashionable dogmas around race. The guidance is a ‘living document’, it explains, and pledges to ‘incorporate the most up-to-date knowledge’. Contested ideas like ‘systemic’ racism, ‘unconscious bias,’ and ‘micro-aggressions’ appear in the guidance. There are also 23 references to the 2017 Lammy Review, which suggested that there was widespread racial bias against ethnic minorities in the British justice system.

Tellingly, in the latest version of the ETBB, there is not a single mention of the 2021 Sewell Report – which concluded that while racism exists in the UK, it is neither consistent with evidence nor practically helpful to say that the UK is ‘institutionally racist’. Anything that challenges the identitarian narrative on race is not fit for the judiciary it seems.

The shameless prevalence of progressive dogma in this judicial document is perhaps unsurprising given how little it has been subject to scrutiny. The 2018 version, for instance, was drawn up in private by a committee of eight judges and the head of the legal team at the Judicial College. Ikram was on the committee as was the employment judge, Tamara Lewis. (Some may recall Lewis’s surprising ruling at a recent employment tribunal, where she found that an employer saying he wanted to hire ‘fewer white men’ was not ‘indicative of an intention to discriminate’.)

The Equal Treatment Bench Book was produced with shockingly little oversight. As Sex Matters points out: ‘There are no published judicial directions that explain how that committee is appointed or how the Equal Treatment Bench Book is developed, agreed and signed off.’ What’s more, the Ministry of Justice has deemed that since the ETBB is developed ‘by judges for judges’, it is not subject to Freedom of Information laws. All in all, says Sex Matters, the process ‘lacks rigour, accountability and transparency’. We might add that for a small group of unelected judges to draw up, in private, guidance that ends up being treated as a point of law is fundamentally undemocratic.

Public trust in the judiciary is based on the bedrock legal principle that whoever we are, we are all equal before the law. When identity politics comes into the picture, it corrodes that trust. Ikram has already given rise to the perception that his views are influencing his rulings. But it is far worse than that: many of these views have been written into official guidance for every judge in Britain.