The EHRC is meant to be a referee. Labour is turning it into a political instrument.

Bridget Phillipson has appointed Ali Harris, the chief executive of the human-rights charity Equally Ours, as an interim commissioner of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), with the role running from 1 January 2026 for 12 months. 

At the same time, the EHRC’s new chair, Mary-Ann Stephenson, has already chosen her first big public moment to warn politicians off describing migration as a threat and to argue that leaving the European Convention on Human Rights would be a mistake. 

Individually, if you felt generous enough, you could defend each appointment as “experience”. Collectively, the message is unmistakable: this watchdog is being forced away from regulation and towards advocacy, its politicisation is unmistakable — on one of the most contested issues in British politics.

And that matters because the EHRC only works if it is visibly impartial. Not merely “independent” on paper. Visible. Because once the public thinks the referee has joined a team, every judgement becomes suspect and the institution loses the consent it needs to function.

Phillipson says her government is committed to “embedding fairness and equality” at the heart of its agenda and that the EHRC has a key role to play.  With politics like that, the direction of travel isn’t surprising. But it is deeply problematic – not least because Phillipson is involved at all.

Taxpayers do not fund regulators to provide an official platform for a particular ideological worldview — especially when that worldview is plainly out of sync with large swathes of the country who are demanding controlled borders, enforced rules, and honest trade-offs. Labour is cowardly enough to say one thing to the Red Wall and claim no responsibility for when regulators take a soft line or a controversial line out of step with voters.

The immediate test: stop activist appointments

A regulator must be staffed by people with a regulator’s temperament: evidence-first, legally grounded, operationally serious. If your recent career is rooted in campaigning on live political controversies, you don’t belong in the chair—or the commissioner’s seat—of a supposedly impartial watchdog.

At minimum, the Government should now insist on a full publication of conflicts of interest in plain English; a clean break from campaigning/lobbying roles linked to live policy issues; and a hard commitment that the EHRC will apply the law, not lobby for policy 

The long-term answer: abolish the quango model

But Conservatives should stop pretending this is just a “better appointments” problem. It’s a structural problem. Boards of politically appointed commissioners are inherently vulnerable to worldview capture — the same networks, the same professional activist class, the same assumptions.

So my view is simple and unapologetic. No to political/activist appointments now. And, longer term, abolish the EHRC in its current quango form and replace it with something lean, legal and accountable:

• rights resolved primarily through courts and tribunals
• a small statutory enforcement inspectorate with tightly defined powers
• policy messaging owned by elected ministers who can be challenged and removed

That’s the constitutional bargain: power must follow accountability.

If “independence” keeps being used as cover for taxpayer-funded activism, then the model itself has to go.

At this point bodies such as EHCR have no public consent to operate but ironically they will continue to tell us what we should and shouldn’t do – without any real ministerial accountability or intervention by them on our behalf – because they’re all branded with the same political outlook.