Mick Hartley

As I noted last week, it was the hated right-wing neo-cons who overthrew the Taliban twenty years ago, leading to a burst of female empowerment and creativity in Afghanistan – now abruptly ended by a Democrat president. And it's the parties of the left who are currently lending their support to gender ideology, leading to the threat to women's hard-won rights we're seeing now. 

Suzanne Moore in the Telegraph, on similar lines – How did the Tories become the only party to protect women?

Here’s a question. Threats of violence to women – good or bad? Controversial, but I am going with very bad indeed. So how has this become acceptable? Labour MP Rosie Duffield won her Canterbury seat in a narrow victory in 2017; previously, it had been Conservative for almost a century. In 2019, in a debate about the Domestic Abuse Bill, she reduced the Commons to silence by talking of her own experience of abuse, stalking and coercive control: “Domestic violence has many faces, and the faces of those who survive it are varied, too.”

Now it turns out Duffield cannot attend the Labour Party conference later this month because of threats to her security. Her crime? Saying on Twitter that only women have a cervix.

She has not backed down , saying repeatedly that she is a feminist and has always supported the rights of trans people “to live freely as they chose”. But many now want her thrown out of the party.

I find it disgusting that while Luciana Berger, the former Labour MP, had to walk around conference with bodyguards because of anti-Semitism, Duffield cannot even attend. What is Labour doing? Where is her support?

Labour has alienated lifelong members and trade unionists to appease its well-heeled activists. The Green Party, meanwhile, when asked to define what a woman is, simply cannot; it likes to think of women as “non-men”. Cheers, chaps! At its conference, it voted against including biological females in its list of oppressed groups. This is the new radicalism, which excludes 51 per cent of the population.

There’s a hilarious recording online of the responses made by tongue-tied Green Party candidates during last year’s council elections, when asked what a woman is. Nick Humberstone said: “I don’t think it’s a very productive question.” Tom Pashby answered: “A cis woman who can’t give birth is not less of a woman, and you can apply that to people who identify as women.” (Yeah, whatever, mate.)

Cleo Lake replied: “Being a woman is an attitude.” Try telling that to the women in Afghanistan, Cleo….

The Liberal Democrats are fully on board with the dogma that biology is not real. Former equalities minister Lynn Featherstone wrote in Lib Dem Voice that anyone who wants to exclude trans women from women-only spaces is not a feminist: “Your views are not welcome in the Liberal Democrats,” she said. Lovely.

The SNP is similarly bonkers. In its proposals, women cannot request female doctors when they have been raped. They are to respect their rapist’s right to identify as female. There is an attempt to push through reform of the Gender Recognition Act so that someone can change their legal sex after three months, no evidence required. When asked about feminists’ concerns about this, Nicola Sturgeon said their views were “not valid”.

So that leaves many of us politically homeless. It is not physically possible for me to vote Conservative. But which party will protect our rights, enshrined in law?

We now end up with threats of male violence aimed at shutting women up, and female MPs not able to attend their own party conferences. This, we are told, is all about inclusivity and progress. So isn’t it odd that it looks a lot like women being intimidated into silence and feelings of worthlessness, the very techniques of coercive control?

Back to the future.