Mick Hartley

Keir Starmer has been interviewed at Mumsnet. Jo Bartosch:

As Labour leader Keir Starmer sat on the Mumsnet leatherette sofa, fielding questions from platform founder Justine Roberts, one could almost feel the sweat trickling down the back of his jacket. Roberts had just hit on that thorniest of issues – the question of children who identify as transgender. With a pained, constipated expression, Starmer attempted to outline his thoughts on the interim report by paediatrician Dr Hilary Cass, who is conducting a review into how the NHS should treat children who want to change their gender. ‘I feel very strongly that children shouldn’t be making these very important decisions without the consent of their parents’, Starmer limply conceded.

But surely this is pretty much Labour policy – that anything, up to and including parental consent, which prevents young children from being immediately affirmed in their chosen new gender identity amounts to conversion therapy, and should be banned with immediate effect.

The Mumsnet interview took place last week, though a clip of it has gone viral on Twitter in the past day or so. While most people would likely agree with Starmer that sometimes children don’t know what is best for them, his comments have sent the woke left into meltdown. Apparently, Starmer’s tepid words amount to an ‘anti-trans dog whistle’ ….

Condemning what has been allowed to happen at the Tavistock clinic should be a no-brainer for any politician. Because to those not blinded by faith in the gender gods, what has been done to children in the name of trans ideology is a medical scandal. It is testament to the moral deficit of the woke left that it would seek to downplay this.

Earlier this year, Sajid Javid, who was health secretary when the interim Cass review was published, compared the fear of being branded ‘transphobic’ for raising concerns about the Tavistock to fears of being called racist when discussing the Rotherham grooming-gangs scandals. The parallels are indeed overwhelming. In both cases, some of the most vulnerable children in the UK were put at serious risk of harm. And those who should have known better turned the other way because they did not want to cause offence.

The rash response to Starmer’s comments needs to be a wake-up call for the Labour Party. This episode offers a clear lesson as to why pandering to the woke will get you nowhere. Theirs is a grievance-driven ideology that will always find new things to be offended by. We need politicians who have the courage to ignore their accusations of ‘transphobia’ – and who will put children’s welfare first.

I somehow doubt that Starmer is one of those courageous politicians. He'll have taken note of the outrage and drawn the appropriate conclusion: don't, ever, annoy the trans lobby.