Labour's broad church of TERFs to wokerati

Is Starmer's 'catch-all' approach good strategy?

Labour should be the party of civil rights. And the failure of the leadership to take a strong stand on trans rights is unnerving. The strategy seems to be to ignore the issue as much as possible, which is undeniably effective and cuts through to voters.

Steven Swinford @Steven_Swinford

Keir Starmer tells @LBC 'almost nobody' is talking about trans issues on doorstep 'I do sometimes just wonder why on earth we spend so much of our time discussing something which isn’t a feature of the dinner table or the kitchen table or the café table or the bar'

Most people know that the right want to stoke a culture war around trans people. It’s been more effective in the US and the Tories see trans and migration as the only issues they can still win on today.

However, in reality poorer people care about their bills, and the middle-class care about their mortgages. It’s a small minority who are up-in-arms about bathrooms and hormones. Labour are the party of economic competence at the moment, and the next election will be fought on a economic battleground - inflation, cost-of-living and tax.

Reports that Starmer has ignored the Labour MP Rosie Duffield for months shows that he isn’t personally comfortable with her transphobic views.

In 2021 Duffield endorsed comments stating that trans people are "mostly heterosexuals cosplaying as the opposite sex"

While I strongly feel that on principle she should have the whip removed, I do understand LOTO’s strategy. Duffield would gain infinitely more power as a martyr, and her censorship would confirm everything that her and the cult of TERFs already think.

Thankfully, a handful of Labour MPs are outspoken advocates for the trans community. Nadia Whittome, Lloyd Russell-Moyle, as well as most of the Socialist Campaign Group continue to speak up. Even Ben Bradshaw, a distinctly more ‘right-wing’ MP within the Labour Party, has shown that he is socially progressive and principled, no doubt in part because his godson is trans. (Unfortunately he is standing down at the next election!) Similarly, Jess Phillips recently included trans girl Brianna Ghey in the yearly list of femicides read out in parliament.

It would be nice to see the Shadow Equalities Minister Anneliese Dodds show more support for such a marginalised group. I don’t see how a relatively unknown politician like Dodds openly supporting trans people would affect the polls, but as we know Starmer and his office are ever-cautious with their precious ‘ming vase’.