Last year, after several instances of grimacing in front of broadcast inquisitors who delighted in his discomfort, it appeared that Keir Starmer had finally reached a clear position on trans issues.
‘A woman is a female adult and in addition to that transwomen are women,’ he told the Times.
But here’s a thing: if transwomen are women, then clearly the serial rapist Adam Graham/Isla Bryson should be in a women’s jail – as it would be an outrage to expect a woman to serve her sentence in a men’s jail.
What’s a quick 180 on a core human rights issue between friends?
Yet Starmer’s shadow home secretary, Yvette Cooper, has now declared that it would be entirely wrong to allow Graham/Bryson into a women’s jail, telling Radio 4 that ‘this dangerous rapist should not be in a women’s prison’. The Labour leader has not taken issue with that and Ms Cooper is not the sort to freelance by promoting unauthorised agendas in any case.
At the 2021 Labour conference, Starmer also told the BBC that stating that only a woman has a cervix, as Labour MP Rosie Duffield had done, was ‘not right’ and constituted something that ‘shouldn’t be said’.
By this I took him to be arguing that a female transsexual, or transman, also has a cervix and yet has a right to not be categorised as a woman – rather than making a bizarre argument that transwomen could be said to have cervices. But you never know with the modern doctrine of transubstantiation in our secular age.
All in all, it was clear that the Owen Jones faction of Labour – which takes it as an article of faith that a full acceptance of self-certified trans identity is part of the progressive arc of history – had won over Sir Keir.
To say he was nailing his colours to the mast might in the circumstances constitute unhelpful phallic imagery, but you get the idea.
And then the opinion-polling started coming in, most notably on the Scottish gender recognition legislation that Starmer was content for his Labour MSPs to support. It turned out that only around 20 per cent of the public backed the idea of speeding up the process of gender self ID or the notion of transwomen having the right to be defined as women in all circumstances.
In recent days, the Labour leader’s other line of defence – that this stuff is not worth dwelling on and is just contrived Tory culture war stuff – has also blown up because of the Graham case which led the BBC 10 p.m. news bulletin on Thursday night.
So he is enacting his by now familiar response to any issue which risks pitting him against a key target group of voters – an unabashed reverse ferret. On everything from whether Jeremy Corbyn would be a suitable prime minister to whether Brexit must be implemented, whether student tuition fees should be dumped, whether key industries should be nationalised, whether free movement is a good thing, or whether private sector outsourcing within the NHS should be ended, Starmer has already U-turned. So what’s a quick 180 on a core human rights issue between friends?
If you are after a principled stance based on a solid ideological framework then clearly Starmer is not your politician and you need to put your faith in someone like the reviled and ‘unhelpful’ Ms Duffield instead.
This almost total absence of consistency or intellectual trustworthiness on the part of Starmer could yet cost him dear. At PMQs this week, Rishi Sunak made it his central point of attack, telling the Labour leader: ‘He has no principles, just petty politics.’
But it isn’t costing him dear yet because of the simple fact that the Tories are in such a dire state: engulfed by sleaze, presiding over disintegrating public services and falling living standards, failing to stem illegal immigration, seeing the public finances worsen on their watch. Even that Tory dependable of the showbiz world Sir Rod Stewart now thinks Britain should give Labour a go.
And it’s not even as if Sunak is himself a reliable redoubt of social conservatism either. Who can forget how he squirmed last year when the broadcaster Julia Hartley-Brewer asked him to say what a woman was? He flunked the challenge, pathetically stating that whatever it was that Boris Johnson had said on the matter in the Commons recently was exactly right.
So Starmer flies on, throwing ideological ballast and even fellow travellers out of the Labour balloon at will, and thus far suffering no discernible penalty as a result. Do voters realise they cannot trust him? Almost certainly. ‘You used to spout jibberish on this,’ point out the Tories. ‘He did. But, then again, you are the Tories,’ replies the electorate.
Comments