It should be the easiest job in the world leading a Labour opposition against a Boris Johnson government, but the wretched Starmer can't do it. There could hardly be a better vote-losing policy than following the trans crowd down the rabbit hole of gender identity, but he just doesn't have the bottle to put his foot down and call a halt.
Sarah Ditum in the Times:
One word has dominated Labour’s 2021 conference. In a different world, where Labour was capable of landing a blow on the government, that word might have been “shortages”: there are gaps on supermarket shelves, roads are clogged with panicked drivers queueing for fuel, and energy companies crumble as gas prices soar. Or it could have been “cuts”, given that the Tories are about to remove the £20 boost to universal credit amid warnings that thousands face poverty.
But neither of those will be the defining word of this week for Labour. Instead, all anybody wants to talk about is “cervix”. In every interview of a Labour politician, there’s a question about the C-word: is it transphobic to say, as the Labour MP Rosie Duffield once tweeted, that only women have a cervix? Canvassers report that out on the doorstep, voters are now demanding answers on the party’s cervix policy. Labour may want to talk political philosophy and even psephology, but all it’s getting back is gynaecology.
...has any party ever walked itself into such a staggeringly unnecessary humiliation? On Sunday, when Andrew Marr first put the cervix question to Sir Keir Starmer, it should not have been a surprise. The harassment of Duffield for her tweet, and her subsequent decision that she felt too unsafe to attend conference, had been front page news the previous weekend. This was not a cervical ambush.
The Sunday before, Marr had pinned down the Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey on whether “Woman: adult human female” is an offensive phrase. (A Lib Dem activist has been banned from holding office for ten years after wearing a T-shirt bearing the slogan). Davey was slippery and evasive. He refused to say what was wrong with the statement, and instead talked about the dangers faced by trans people. He did not mention that women also face violence and discrimination, even though it was only days after the south London teacher Sabina Nessa had been killed.
Surely, with this fair warning, Starmer could do better. Instead, he rushed directly into the trap. “Is it transphobic to say ‘only women have a cervix?’” asked Marr. “It is something that shouldn’t be said,” replied Starmer. Asked to explain why it shouldn’t be said, however, Starmer declined to elaborate. Perhaps, like many who have taken on the pieties of modern gender identity, he does not even really understand why “only women have a cervix” became taboo — only that it is unsayable.
...most people beyond the activist core use and understand “woman” and “man” to mean “female” and “male”. That doesn’t mean they’re engaged in hatred of trans people. It means that they’re regular citizens using language in the regular way. To the average voter, “only women have a cervix” is a banal anatomical truth. Telling them it’s now offensive is alienating; refusing even to say why it’s offensive is downright insulting.
And still, Labour MPs failed to figure out their line. When the radio host Nick Ferrari asked it of the shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves on Monday morning, she stuttered and prevaricated and eventually said: “I don’t even know how to answer that question.” Well, obviously. Ian Murray, shadow secretary of state for Scotland, complained that he was being asked for a “medical science thesis” when the topic came up on Woman’s Hour, then hedged his way around the issue....
Sajid Javid was among the many Conservatives to jump on the cervix bandwagon, accusing Starmer of a “total denial of scientific fact”. But it’s not just a useful stick to beat Labour with. Perhaps more importantly, it’s a line of defence in those “blue wall” constituencies Davey has his eye on, the once-safe Tory seats growing disillusioned and flirting with the Lib Dems. However clapped out the Tories look, they’re going to be difficult to dislodge as long as they’re the only party speaking a language voters understand.
Perhaps Starmer feels that there's only so much he can do against the active Labour core - the sort of people who turn up to party conferences. He's already in a battle to remove the last vestiges of Corbynism: he may feel that he doesn't want another battle now by taking on the gender ideologues.
That could be a huge mistake.
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