Labour won the election on a campaign of change and its politicians certainly have a knack for, um, changing their minds. Sir Keir has made some fascinating U-turns over the years, and it now appears that Lisa Nandy has a taken a leaf out of his book – rather publicly changing her tune on the culture wars.
‘The era of culture wars is over,’ Nandy proclaimed in her first speech as Culture Secretary earlier this month. ‘For too long, for too many people, the story we tell ourselves about ourselves as a nation has not reflected them, their communities or their lives. This is how polarisation, division and isolation thrives.’ Wise words – but has the Culture Secretary heeded them herself?
Apparently not. It transpires that Nandy has, er, rather forcefully waded into the very same ‘culture wars’ she denounced only a fortnight ago. The last Conservative government supported a complete ban on trans people taking party in elite women’s sporting events – but Labour’s new Culture Secretary disagrees. Taking a rather controversial view, Nandy has now said that trans athletes should be allowed to take part in women’s sports. Talk about jumping in at the deep end…
Speaking to The House magazine, Nandy defended her stance – saying that individual sports should be allowed to decide whether to allow trans people to take part:
I think that is the right approach. And I think we ought to respect the fact that they’re far more expert in making those judgments and decisions than we are.
Rather contradictorily, she went on:
But I think most have come to the conclusion that, although they want to be as inclusive as possible, biology does matter when it comes to sport, and that it’s impossible to balance the requirement of fairness without ensuring that they take biology into account.
Er, right. Not like the Labour party to be vague on specifics…
Starmer himself has been criticised for flip-flopping over the trans debate. One of his own MPs – women’s rights campaigner Rosie Duffield – was left rather unimpressed with Sir Keir’s election debate admission that his current position reflects ‘what Tony Blair said the other day, that a man has a penis and a woman has a vagina’, after he previously slammed Duffield for saying that only women have a cervix. ‘From now on, I shall be submitting my every comment and thought (particularly those mainstream views which most people agree with) to the former Labour Prime Minister so that it may officially be de-toxified,’ Duffield tweeted drily. Expect Nandy’s latest intervention to cause more trouble in paradise…
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