In her latest appearance before the Women and Equalities Committee, the EHRC Chair, Baroness Falkner of Margravine surprised many by this statement.
We do surveys of opinion into our standing, and I will share one simple figure with you. I do not like words like approval or disapproval, but in the first year of my service, the so called approval rating—people who thought positively about us—was in the region of 35%, and it is currently 81%.1
81% public approval seemed unlikely to me and indeed it wasn’t true as Falkner later acknowledged.
During the Committee session on 11 June, I cited data in response to Q2 related to our approval rating. I would like to clarify that these figures refer to our media sentiment analysis which measures the tone and favourability of media coverage about EHRC, not public opinion polling. The latest figures from our media monitoring are:
a. Positive media sentiment has improved from 35.2% in 2021-22 to 80.6% in 2024-25
b. Negative media sentiment has decreased from 5.3% in 2022-23 to 1.2% in 2024-252
Impressive numbers but positive media coverage is not the same as positive public opinion. The likes of the Telegraph, Mail, Express and Sun do not want human rights to get in the way of capitalism. The Telegraph have a particular anti trans rampage at the moment.
It’s as if the Police patted themselves on the back if criminals thought they were wonderful.
- Sourced from the transcript at https://committees.parliament.uk/oralevidence/16043/pdf/ ↩︎
- The letter from Falkner is at https://committees.parliament.uk/publications/48625/documents/254825/default/ ↩︎
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