A few weeks ago, Keir Starmer was told by his advisers that he would have to U-turn on his radical stance on trans rights or he would not win the next general election. One senior Labour source told the Times back then: ‘If Keir is still being asked by the time the election campaign begins what a woman is, then he’s lost on day one. Scotland is a warning to him… self-ID is not going to happen under a Labour government.’
So it was only a matter of time before Starmer’s support for gender self-ID went the way of many of his other principled stances such as support for free movement, nationalising utilities, banning private sector involvement in the NHS. Not to mention abolishing student fees, the idea that Jeremy Corbyn was fit to be prime minister and Shamima Begum’s right to be a British citizen.
Is he acting out of principle or opportunism? Or has he just sensed the way the wind is blowing?
Though Starmer has not quite yet bitten the bullet on acknowledging that male transsexuals are not in fact women, he is not now committing to bring in gender self-certification, as Nicola Sturgeon has attempted to do north of the border.
Asked what a woman is afresh by the Sunday Times, he replied: ‘For 99.9 per cent of women, it is completely biological…and of course they haven’t got a penis.’ His previous assertion that ‘it shouldn’t be said’ that only a woman has a cervix has apparently been sent into rhetorical exile.
But rather than spell out in a straightforward way what rights he thinks trans women should have as regards women’s protected spaces, the Labour leader engaged in yet more deflection, saying: ‘I think there is a fear that somehow there could be the rolling back of some of the things that have been won. And there are still many battles that need to go ahead for women and I don’t think we should roll anything back. I think we should go on to win the next battles for women.’
This really will not do. There are some things that trans campaigners say they are entitled to that certainly would involve putting women’s rights into reverse and indeed have already done so.
Starmer’s fence-sitting is laughable but all too typical. When the Sturgeon legislation was put before the Scottish parliament, Labour MSPs were whipped to support it. But back at Westminster a few weeks later, Labour MPs were advised to abstain on whether the UK government should have blocked it.
His ‘no rolling back’ stance is presumably meant to reassure women that under Labour, male transsexuals will not have access by right to women’s refuges, jails, sporting contests, public loos or other single-sex spaces. Yet he will not say that, preferring instead to give out socially conservative shade on other aspects of the trans debate, such as arguing that parents must be told by schools if their offspring are identifying as trans or questioning their gender (‘I’d want to know. I say that as a parent’).
But is he acting out of principle or opportunism? Does he really believe in protecting the traditional sex categories or has he just sensed the way the wind is blowing?
Helpfully, he has answered this question frankly himself by coming up with a new formula on social reform that runs as follows: ‘If you can’t take the public with you on a journey of reform, then you’re probably not on the right journey.’
This sounds reasonable enough on first hearing but think about it: what he is really saying is that he will give his support to ideas on the basis of whether they are popular, not whether he considers them to be right. Opportunism actually is his principle.
How would this approach fare in power? Surely it would merely encourage lobbyists of all kinds in the belief that PM Starmer could be browbeaten into any U-turn so long as sufficient pressure was applied.
Currently it is what Tony Blair once described as ‘the forces of conservatism’ which hold most sway over Starmer because he so desperately needs to bag the votes of social conservatives. But in power it could equally be the forces of the identitarian Left, which is so well dug-in across public bodies, that he needs to keep sweet.
One is reminded of Winston Churchill’s withering assessment of the Stanley Baldwin administration of the mid-1930s: ‘They go on in strange paradox: decided only to be undecided; resolved to be irresolute; adamant for drift; solid for fluidity; all-powerful to be impotent.’
It is impossible to win a battle of ideas when you won’t truly commit to any idea. But perhaps Starmer is banking on it being impossible to lose one under such circumstances either. Surely Britain deserves better than that.
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