Yesterday I ended a post about the Greens and their gender problems by wondering about the Labour Party situation. Well, according to Kim Thomas at The Critic, it's not looking good:
Carol Angharad, 77, is a longstanding lesbian campaigner, Labour Party activist and a councillor in Belper, Derbyshire. After posting tweets in support of sex-based rights, she was reprimanded by the regional Labour Party and required to write a letter of apology to the local Pride group. In November 2020, the national party told her that she had contravened its social media policy and that a warning of possible expulsion would stay on her file for eighteen months. She has been subject, she says, to “three years of intimidation and harassment, much of it conducted publicly on Facebook”, and has had her Facebook account hacked. After she and others complained about the “abusive and libellous” Facebook posts written about her, she was told by the regional Labour Party director that the posts did not breach party policy and no action would be taken.
When Mandy Clare, a councillor in Cheshire West and Cheshire, was elected to the party’s National Women’s Committee (NWC), another prominent national activist began calling for her constituency party and others to denounce her for her gender-critical views. Clare’s attempts at NWC meetings to raise women’s experience of being bullied were cut off and not minuted. When she signed the LWD, fellow committee members and members of her constituency party put out a stream of tweets accusing her of transphobia. She asked the national party to investigate the intimidation directed at her, but it refused. She was told there was no right of appeal.
Clare was removed by her local party as a candidate for the ward she already represented. After being shortlisted to stand for another ward, she was hauled before a three-strong panel to determine whether she could stand as a Labour councillor. She was not told which social media posts she was to be questioned on, or allowed to bring another person to the interview or record what happened. At the interview, she was asked to explain posts she’d made encouraging women to speak out. It was, she says, “a really shoddy process from start to finish”. She was told she had brought the Labour Party into disrepute, and was being removed from the councillors’ selection panel. Clare resigned from the party and now sits as an independent.
The Labour Party’s determination to stamp out views supporting sex-based rights has led to the loss of committed, capable activists who in normal circumstances would be considered an asset. Karen Ingala Smith, CEO of domestic abuse charity NIA and a lifelong Labour supporter, had her application to join the Labour Party turned down because she had “engaged in conduct online that may reasonably be seen to demonstrate hostility based on gender identity”.
Is there any chance that this might change? Some think the party’s stance might be softening... In a recent interview with Mumsnet, Keir Starmer appeared to support the right of women to single-sex sports.
Yet Starmer has refused to condemn the abuse Rosie Duffield MP has received for supporting single-sex spaces, even claiming that Duffield was “wrong” to say only women could have a cervix. In 2020, LWD [Labour Women’s Declaration] prepared a dossier of incidents in which women had been bullied to share with the party’s general secretary, David Evans. He cancelled their agreed meeting, and LWD has been unsuccessful in its attempts to secure a new date. At the party conference in September this year, LWD and Lesbian Labour were both refused stalls within the main conference hall, despite space being available.
The chances of a change, then, are slim to non-existent. Starmer has committed himself to trans-women-are-women gender ideology, and it's all so embedded now in local Labour politics - as we see here - that it's very unlikely we're going to see any change. So women by the score are deserting a party that's clearly deserted them.
See here for Karen Ingala Smith's interview with Janice Turner on Saturday.
Comments