Starmer’s pets

Joan Smith on Keir Starmer’s buddy relationship with the People of Gender:

[G]ender-critical women’s organisations and even some of his own MPs struggle to get a meeting with Sir Keir Starmer. 

Not so trans activists, for whom Starmer apparently has all the time in the world. This week he welcomed members of the lobby group LGBT+ Labour to a reception at Westminster and offered them everything the most dedicated trans activist could want, short of self-ID. Starmer was accompanied by a raft of frontbenchers including his deputy, Angela Rayner, and the Shadow Women and Equalities Minister, Anneliese Dodds.

“Together we’ll ban conversion therapy, strengthen hate crime laws and tackle health inequalities,” Dodds posted excitedly on X.

But the “conversion therapy” she means isn’t conversion therapy, and by “health inequalities” she probably means the tragic unfairness of not being able to swap sex as easily as you can swap hats. Meanwhile, what about women? The people who are subject to rape which goes uninvestigated, unprosecuted, unconvicted, unpunished? Any inequalities there?

It must be galling for Labour MPs such as Rosie Duffield, who has been relentlessly targeted by LGBT+ Labour, to see the party’s leading figures palling up to its members. Starmer has not spoken to Duffield for more than two years, leaving her to cope unsupported with endless smears and demands that she should lose the Labour whip. He is evidently more comfortable with the widely-ridiculed MP for Jarrow, Kate Osborne, who was at the reception despite having boasted on X about her delusion that some women have a penis. 

It’s galling for Rosie and for all of us – galling, infuriating, frustrating. It feels as if 50 years of progress have been torched.

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