Keir Starmer thinks ‘this is the time now to lower the temperature’ on the gender debate. To ‘move forward’. To ‘conduct this debate with the care and compassion that it deserves’. That is what he said at Prime Minister’s Questions. What a shallow, hollow man he is.
Now is the time to lower the temperature? Not when women’s meetings were being cancelled, their proceedings disrupted, and their attendees attacked? Not when Kathleen Stock was being hounded out of Sussex University, Maya Forstater lost her employment contract, or Jo Phoenix was unfairly constructively dismissed from the Open University? Not when David Lammy called gender critics ‘dinosaurs’, Angela Rayner signed a charter calling feminist campaigners ‘hate groups’, or Karen Ingala-Smith’s party membership application was rejected because Labour thought her feminist activism could be interpreted as ‘hostility based on gender identity’?
Move forward? Every time proponents of biology tried to move forward from this reality-throttling ideology, they were impeded by good Labour people upholding the new orthodoxy. Some of these people were leading KCs, some were Labour leaders, and some were both. Like the one who announced that ‘99.9 per cent of women… haven’t got a penis’; who assured us ‘trans women are women, and that is not just my view — that is actually the law’; who even insisted that it was ‘not right’ that only women have a cervix and this was ‘something that shouldn’t be said’.
Conduct this debate with care and compassion? Few could disagree. But where was the Prime Minister’s care and compassion for Rosie Duffield, who was hounded out of the Labour party for stating medical and legal facts about the nature of sex? How much care and compassion did Pauline McNeill get? Two years ago, the Labour MSP hosted an event at the Scottish Parliament titled ‘The Meaning of Sex Under the Equality Act 2010’, with a panel of legal specialists and women’s rights campaigners. Then Scottish Labour received a complaint and suddenly McNeill was no longer hosting her own event. Care and compassion weren’t much in evidence when Starmer’s party refused conference stalls to Labour Women’s Declaration and the LGB Alliance.
And, fine, it’s politics. You take a position for a while, it doesn’t work out, you ditch it and move on, all the while briefing that you’ve been consistent from the start. I get all that. What I don’t get is the prologue. There was a time when Starmer came to believe that men who called themselves women were women. How did he arrive at this conviction? Who did he read? What evidence convinced him? It must have been very persuasive to get a KC to adopt a highly contested interpretation of the law, doubly so when he was leader of a political party and eager to win the next general election.
And now he no longer believes that men can become women. It appears that the Supreme Court judgment changed his mind, but that only returns us to the above questions. How did he get the law so wrong? Has he reflected on how these errors came about? Have they prompted any doubts about his wider judgment?
The Prime Minister is now free to believe in biology
Of course, we all know it’s just a pretence. The Supreme Court didn’t inspire a dark night of the soul for Starmer because he didn’t really believe in gender ideology in the first place. He said he did because it was politically necessary at the time and he has recanted because Lord Hodge’s ruling has removed that necessity. The Prime Minister is now free to believe in biology. This makes for a very odd U-turn: Starmer has stopped holding a view he never held and adopted a view he always held but was unwilling to admit. It’s not the cowardice that offends, it’s not even the dishonesty, it’s the sheer insubstantiality of the man. There is nothing there. No conviction and no principle, neither passion nor purpose, a vacuum of personality and philosophy. He is a simulation of a Prime Minister, the non-playable character of British politics, a phantom premier who makes Number 10 emptier by his presence.
Too many Labour people and progressives more generally have come to believe in their own superior virtue. They are the good people, the smart people, the people who care, and so they gravitate towards ideas and policies that seem good, smart and caring. That their opponents, who are wicked, unenlightened and cruel, disagree with them only confirms the righteousness of these positions. In time, vibes harden into dogma, the absurd becomes doctrine, doubt is damned as heresy, and pluralism surrenders to catechism. It is no longer a matter of politics or policy but sheep and goats. However, it is a moralism in which virtue attaches not to actions but to those who perform them, which is why Starmer was noble when he said trans women were women and noble when he said they weren’t. When you’re always on the right side of history, it doesn’t matter if you switch sides.
Perhaps the rest of us should lower the temperature, but the Prime Minister has nothing to worry about on that front. He is never more than one degree above or below tepid.
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