Policing Pride: R (on the application of Lindsey Smith) v The Chief Constable of Northumbria Police [2025] EWHC 1805 (Admin)

Pride and the Police

Pride is political. It is a defiant demand by long marginalised groups to be seen and respected as equal members of society. Its slogans emphasise the struggles of LGBT+ groups to be seen and accepted in the public sphere, and their often uncomfortable interactions with the authorities, and particularly the police, during this struggle. Stonewall, as the chant goes, was a riot. So the involvement of police services in Pride marches has long been the subject of tensions, but for many police forces, it is a visible means of affirming the commitment of the police to fair treatment where this has been painfully lacking in the past. So Pride is political, but in the way that many public events in the UK might arguably be. The Smith case involved, at its core, a claim that Pride events advanced a particular ideology and that it was therefore irrational for the police, in light of the requirement that they carry out their duties impartially, to participate in uniform in such events.

This is a quite remarkable contention. It isn’t a claim that it is inadvisable for the police to act in this way, it is an assertion that it is so misguided as a decision as to be unlawful. Irrationality ordinarily remains a high hurdle for claimants to clear in judicial review in instances where a decision maker has a broad discretion, with the High Court having to find that no reasonable Chief Constable would have permitted uniformed officers to have participated in a “political event” in this way. Linden J’s conclusion in the High Court that the involvement of uniformed officers from Northumbria police in Newcastle Pride in 2024 was indeed irrational is therefore an outcome which will come as an unwelcome shock for many police forces, where participation in Pride events (to different degrees) has become unexceptional activity for years.

Case Overview

Lindsey Smith describes herself as a “gender critical lesbian”, opposed to “gender ideology” and the presence of police forces at Pride events. In the case of the 2024 Newcastle Pride, Northumbria Police involved themselves in a number of different ways, including marching in the parade; setting up a pro-Pride display during the march; displaying materials featuring the Progress Pride flag and parking police vans with trans flag colours at the event. The difference between the Progress Pride flag and the ‘regular’ Pride flag is the explicit inclusion of pink, blue and white colours representing trans people (in addition to stripes representing minority ethnic groups and those living with AIDS, two groups the claimants – presumably – had no problem with).

The police’s duty of impartiality is informed by the content of a number of Regulations and Codes. These include the Police Regulations 2003 which set out “the terms and conditions which govern police officers as office holders” (see paragraph 62 of the judgment). The Regulations stipulate that “a member of a police force shall at all times abstain from any activity which is likely to interfere with the impartial discharge of his duties or which is likely to give rise to the impression amongst members of the public that it may so interfere”. In particular, they shall “not take any active part in politics”. The leading authority on the regulations (Champion v Chief Constable of the Gwent Constabulary [1990] 1 WLR 1) saw the House of Lords interpreting the provisions as meaning that officers must “favour… neither one side nor the other”, and avoid any “overly partisan activit[ies]” lest they risk breaching the Regulations.

But Smith’s case was not a direct challenge alleging breaches of the relevant Regulations. Rather, as we noted above, it was a rationality challenge, relying on Wednesbury. The question for the Court was, therefore, whether the decision to approve the involvement of police forces at Pride lacked any rational basis whatsoever. The Court found that, given the importance of neutrality and impartiality to the police force’s work, it would be irrational for them to participate in an event which would undermine that duty. The critical question was, therefore, whether participation at the Pride event would undermine this duty – was participation political, partisan or likely to give rise to the impression of bias or partiality on the part of police?

Many would instinctively say no. Participation in Pride events might signal many things, including a commitment to challenging and tackling homophobia and transphobia in all its forms, a celebration of LGBT+ people, including trans people, and an opportunity to listen and learn from the UK’s dark history marginalised people’s rights. But Gender Critical (‘GC’) groups regard the promotion and protection of trans rights in particular as ideological, contestable, and dangerous. Associating with these causes, in their view, does not signal mere solidarity with transgender people, but an active promotion of the position of “transgender activists”, or alternately, “gender ideology” (what exactly these terms mean remains unclear, despite their repeated use in the judgment).

Standing

Famously there is not a general public-interest basis on which a person can walk into the High Court and insist on being granted a judicial review of a public body’s decision. The basis on which Smith is said to have an interested affected by the Chief Constable’s decision to participate in Pride is discussed at paragraph 31 of the judgment:

The letter described the Claimant as a “gender critical lesbian” who wished to express her views about gender ideology and to protest against it. It set out her dealings with the Northumbria Police in relation to online harassment of her about which, she said, the Force had done nothing. She contrasted this with her being investigated by the police for a potential breach of the Malicious Communication Act 1988 when she posted gender critical views. This, she said, had led her to conclude that the Force was biased against gender critical people.

This is a pretty thin basis for an interest. In almost any other context the idea that the police force had been involved in investigating the claimant over alleged malicious communications would likely be treated as being an irrelevance, or evidence of an axe to grind (this was not, after all, a judicial review challenging perceived bias in the conduct of those investigations). Linden J, however, goes out of his way to construct a public interest basis for standing in this case:

The issues raised by the Claim are important, current, controversial and of public interest. This hardly needs to be explained further but the case concerns the application of the duty of impartiality owed by police officers and the role of the chief officer of a police force in this regard in the context of community engagement and/or promoting diversity…

His eagerness to accept this claim is not deflected by the fact that the official Inspectorate (HMICFRS) guidance on such parades has changed since the 2024 Pride, and with it the approach of Northumbria Police. None of this dissuades him from tackling this case, or leads him to treat it as “academic”. The thin basis on which standing appears to have been accepted in this case is compounded by the fact that, in the context of judicial review (which this case is), standing often acts as a bar to even meritorious claims. Infamously, the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission’s challenge to Northern Ireland’s (then) highly restrictive abortion laws collapsed when a Supreme Court majority ruled that it did not have standing to bring the challenge. This was despite a different majority of the same Court upholding the merits of the challenge. The importance of the issues brought by the Commission – and despite their merits – did not cure their lack of standing to bring the issues in the first place.

It is true that in practice, a determination of the merits of a challenge implies the Court was satisfied as to the claimant’s standing. After all, the Court is prevented by statute from granting permission to a claim for judicial review unless the claimant has sufficient interest in the matter being challenged. But it is therefore important to be certain of the sufficiency of a claimant’s interest in the matter she challenges. The decision under challenge in Smith was Northumbria Police’s participation (as the police force and not as individual officers out of uniform) in Northern Pride 2024, which included Northumbria Police’s association with the Progress Pride Flag. The decision did not affect the Claimant’s ability to express her own beliefs, particularly when the judgment does not set out much evidence that she had been affected by the Police’s participation at the Pride event. Arguably the most relevant evidence she herself gave – quoted by the Court at paragraph 47 – was that of the Northumbria Police telling a Christian preacher to stop preaching. The Claimant claimed that this action:

[…] sent a powerful message to the trans activists and others who support gender ideology that the Northumbria police were “on your side”. To people like me who do not agree with gender ideology, to the Christian preacher who was trying to proclaim his message before he was silenced, and to anyone else who doesn’t agree with the other political aims of that march, the message was equally clear: the Northumbria police is not sympathetic (and is most certainly less sympathetic) to your stance, and you would do well to moderate your behaviour and speech accordingly.

The Court does not state what the preacher’s ‘message’ was to which the police responded as they did (indeed, whether that message concerned trans people or their rights), and nor is there any basis provided in the quoted evidence for extrapolating the police’s engagement with the preacher to anyone else. It is true that the Claimant’s evidence was not disputed by the Defendant, but standing goes to jurisdiction; it is something the Court must determine for itself, not leave to the parties (see e.g. R (GLP and Runnymede Trust) v Prime Minister and Health Secretary [2022] EWHC 298 (Admin), [29]). In reality, the Claimant’s interest is extremely thin. It might even fairly be described as a stretch. But it is startling to see it accepted as sufficient for the purposes of judicial review.

Irrationality

The critical passage on the substantive issue comes in paragraph 130. Linden J ruled that “it was contrary to the uniformed officers’ duties … to participate in the 2024 March in the way that they did” because “Northern Pride clearly and strongly supports gender ideology and transgender rights”. Note here the suspect nature of “transgender rights”, being bound up with “gender ideology”, a term favoured by GC campaigners to discredit those who support trans people. The presence of Progress Pride flags and the pink-and-blue marked police cars parked at the march did not signal institutional support for a group with a protected characteristic but a nefarious and impermissible alignment with a forbidden “ideology”.

As such, the authorisation to station officers at Pride was declared unreasonable and irrational. The court could discern no rational basis for the Chief Constable’s decision. Though Linden J stated (at paragraph 131) that”[a] key reason for taking part in the March was publicly to support the beliefs and aims which the March represented and sought to promote, and this was as true of the police officers who did so as it was of any other marchers (emphasis added)”, this conclusion is itself suspect. The Chief Constable in her witness statement spotlit the “culture of tolerance and respect towards members of [the LGBT+ community]” which she took as part of the “central aims” of the Pride March (see paragraph 50). The Judge does not appear to have drawn any inferences from this understanding on the part of the Chief Constable, most relevantly that her identification of the March’s “central aims” may have plausibly informed, if not acted as, the reasons for Northumbria Police’s participation in the Pride March. In fact, when weighing up the parties’ evidence on this question, Linden J accepted as “plausible” the Claimant’s perception of the police’s general ability to be impartial on the basis of reasons the Claimant attributed to the police, but attached no importance to the Chief Constable’s own evidence about the police’s understanding of the March or its aims. There are, to put it bluntly, no plausible reasons in the judgment for differentiating between the respective parties’ evidence on this issue.

Perhaps ironically, the leading authority on the legal rationality standard is another case named Smith, which also involved LGBT spaces: the first Smith case, decided back in 1996, was a challenge to the Ministry of Defence’s decision to ban gays and lesbians from the armed forces. In that case, the Court of Appeal held that the ban was not so unreasonable so as to meet the lofty legal standard for irrationality, notwithstanding the impact on the people subject to the ban. So, it would seem that banning gays from the military was not irrational. But, according to Linden J, letting police officers attend Pride events was.

Gender Critical rhetoric in the judgment

Linden J, at the outset of the judgment, was eager to dispel any suggestion that the court taking a position on the “competing views” at issue in the case:

[I]t is not necessary for me express any views about the moral, political or philosophical rights or wrongs of the competing views and causes in this case, and I do not do so. Nor should what I say below be seen as indicating agreement or disagreement with the views of Northern Pride and/or the participants in the events which it organises. My concern is solely to assess the lawfulness of the decisions taken by the Defendant in relation to the 2024 Event, applying established public law principles.

It is, of course, essential to the legitimacy of a court that it should present itself as the neutral arbiter over a dispute. There are, however, very good reasons why this statement should not be accepted at face value.

The most obvious reason relates to the promotion, and at times veneration, by Linden J of Professor Kathleen Stock as the (sole) expert witness in this case. Stock, of course, is a famous Gender Critical academic and campaigner, and a trustee of the controversial charity LGB Alliance. It is unsurprising, then, to see that Stock gave a “clear and succinct explanation” (paragraph 9) of what she termed “gender identity theory” or “gender ideology”, setting it up as in opposition to her own “sex realist” position (paragraph 9). She suggested that “gender ideology” is a belief system inherently committed to ideas such as reform of the Gender Recognition Act, self-ID, and – again, in her own words, “access, by right, for natal males … to nominally woman-only spaces” (paragraph 11). All of this was quoted with seeming approval by Linden J.

Stock also gave her own “history of the Pride movement” (see paragraph 12), framing Pride’s message as one which is always “strongly committed to gender ideology” (paragraph 13). Stock, then, performed a two-step elision of ideas: the first was to suggest that trans people, or those supporting them on marches, are inherently committed to “gender ideology” and all of the ideas associated with it. The second, equally dubious, assertion is that Pride marches are inherently bound up with “gender ideology” and all of the ideas and positions Stock ascribes to it, too. Pride is political. But we are not sure that all trans people, and all attendees at Pride, necessarily subscribe to the particular tenets of “gender ideology” Stock proposes.

Further, the language used by Stock, and repeated with seeming approval in the judgment, is not neutral. It is not designed to be neutral. The language of “transactivists” and especially “gender ideology” are intended to cast support for trans people as something inherently ideological, debatable and even farcical. It is disappointing to see that Linden J repeats these loaded terms uncritically throughout his judgment.

In contrast to his unquestioning reliance on Stock, the judge appears very sceptical towards the Chief Constable’s own evidence, in which she described Pride as “a celebration and festival” (paragraph 53), and expressed the view that “the central purpose of the march is not… controversial” (paragraph 54). Why such views were cast aside as irrelevant, whereas Stock’s views on Pride were accepted as correct, is unclear.

All of this led to the position where Pride is seen as something which is inherently suspect, almost nefarious, in nature. No wonder, then, that police would breach their duty of neutrality by appearing there. But that is only true if Pride, and support for trans people by their allies more widely, conforms to the stereotypes put forward by the Gender Critical movement, which considers transgender matters (and, to a significant extent, trans people) to be political and contestable. If the trans flag, trans colours, and trans support are successfully cast as being political and contestable, their place in public life becomes debatable. Further, owing to duties of neutrality, the police (and other institutions) must stay away from them. Those marching at Pride, including the police, are not simply supporting LGBT+ people and celebrating diversity (no matter what they say!) – they are making nefarious claims about self-ID and toilets. No doubt some Pride attendees would hold some of the views Stock ascribes to “gender ideology” (at least, those aspects of “gender ideology” which are not just thinly-veiled attempts to associate trans people with rapists). But that is not to say that a police officer waving a Progress Pride flag is really advocating for “gender ideology” in the sense Stock describes; a police car painted in blue and pink colours does not signal institutional support for self-ID; and colourful face paint does not commit its wearer to any particular position on the position of women in professional sport.

Perhaps many think it should. But if it did, it would be very unlikely that the police would be involved in the first place (see paras 53-56, in which the Chief Constable expresses her view that Pride is, primarily, a celebration of diversity). For better or worse, the police do not see their presence at Pride as indicating anything more radical than a straightforward showing of support for LGBT+ people.

Application to other cases

The framing of this judgment skews the outcome. The declaration of that the police involvement in the 2024 Northern Pride event was unlawful might appear limited to its facts, but question marks hang over its broader implications. Or, in the words of Linden J, at paragraph 137, “[i]t will be a matter for the Defendant to consider, in the light of what I have said in this judgment, whether her current proposed approach to the 2025 Event should remain as it is”. But which of the “activities in question” produced the conclusion that members of the public would be left with the impression that police officers were not impartial in the exercise of their duties? The stall staffed by uniformed officers? The involvement of uniformed officers in the march? The involvement of any on-duty officers in the event? All appear to be called into question by a judgment which makes no effort to frame the limits of what would have amounted to rational engagement by the police.

The clearest way to avoid litigation is for the police to avoid any participation in such events, notwithstanding the benefits that the Chief Constable identified in building police relationships with LGBT+ people. But if this is the case for Pride events, should the police have a presence at any event which might be subject to some level of contestation? It is worth noting how dismissive the court was, at paragraph 54, of the evidence submitted by the Chief Constable that Pride was essentially a cultural event:

The Defendant says that … [t]he event is not aligned to any political party. All of these considerations strengthen her view that the central purpose of the March is not socially or politically controversial. Again, this does not really address the Claimant’s perspective or her evidence.

Linden J, as noted above, appeared receptive to evidence that an unnamed “Christian street preacher” was subject to a policing intervention during the Pride event, as noted by Lindsey Smith (paragraph  47). So once again, Pride is political, but as an assertion of the rights of a section of society to be recognised and respected. To be an event so political as to call into question police impartiality if they are involved in it, the Court appears to be concluding that all that that is needed is some degree of social contest over the issues in question. If some level of contestability is really all that is required to raise impartiality concerns, then why would it not call police participation in (for example) Remembrance Day events into question, on the basis that some anti-war protesters would perceive that they would not be fairly policed? And if this is not the case, then what makes an event connected to trans people so exceptional?

And what of other public bodies that are expected to act with a level of impartiality; the NHS in the treatment of patients, or the civil service in its administration of public functions? For all that this decision is focused on the police, if it is correct in reasoning and outcome then there seems to be little in the judgment to distinguish between the police and other public service providers. It appears that mere “official” involvement in Pride carries sufficient weight as to create an actionable impression of bias. Although this case directly involved the specific impartiality duty on the police, Linden J was eager to point out, at paragraph 110, that “the issue of impartiality is one which a court is likely to be in a good position to assess in most cases”. This rather elevates the significance of a very strict conception of impartiality over other issues that informed the Chief Constable’s decision making, around community relations and the ethos of the police force. He proceeded to assert that “[i]ssues in relation to actual or apparent bias are commonly required to be decided by the courts which, themselves, are also required to act fairly and impartially”. Broader duties against bias were seamlessly elided with the specific policing duty in the court’s framing.

This reasoning is deeply troubling and far-reaching in its scope, perhaps extending to any public body flying the Progress Pride flag. If they are to avoid litigation on such issues, this is one stage off the Court saying “Don’t Say Gay”, and whatever you do, “Don’t Say Trans”.

Conclusion

At best, it might be concluded that Linden J reached a decision without giving full consideration to the context of trans rights or the role of the police in contemporary society. All the talk of a trans “ideology” has a corrosive effect on the idea that the police need to be seen to reach out to marginalised groups. But this decision comes just months after the UK Supreme Court decided For Women Scotland, and it is difficult to conclude that the High Court in Smith was not emboldened to reach this decision on the basis that rights for trans people have fallen out of fashion. The very fact that the Northern Pride Committee was “deeply disappointed” with the Supreme Court’s decision was in itself accepted as evidence of its “ideological” disposition (paragraph 22). In a court process in which trans people have not played any active part, their status in the public sphere, through the visible commitment of the authorities to fair policing towards them, has been actively undermined. The pressure now shifts to an under-resourced police force to appeal this decision, even in the current climate of hostility towards trans people.

 

Anurag Deb is a PhD candidate at Queen’s University Belfast. @anuragdeb.bsky.social

Lewis Graham is a Fellow in Law at Christ’s College, Cambridge and a Lecturer in Law at the University of Manchester. @lewisgrahamlaw.bsky.social

Colin Murray is a professor of law and democracy at Newcastle University. ‪@colinmurray.bsky.social