Mick Hartley

Graham Linehan at Spiked – Starmer’s slipperiness on trans is utterly inexcusable:

As the Telegraph noted this week, Keir Starmer’s pledge to remove ‘gender ideology’ from schools is hollow, as he doesn’t understand what the term means. This the Labour leader has in common with many comfortable, middle-class men who only read the Guardian and get their news from the BBC. These men – and I was once among them – refuse to believe stories from ‘unclean’ sources. Thus, many people in this country are as clueless as Starmer is on the subject, though they at least have the excuse that they aren’t about to run the sixth-largest economy in the world…..

Starmer has had many years now of not having to address the gender issue. As he got on with thinking about important stuff like how to pay for, say, infrastructure, he continued to inhale toxins from a radical ideology spread by his comfortable, middle-class spads, a younger crowd who probably themselves have a friend who blew their minds when he started wearing black lipstick to the pub. They too have been programmed with the copy-and-pasted responses they’ve learned on Twitter: ‘Trans rights are human rights’ (meaningless); ‘You have a gender-neutral toilet in your house’ (stupid); ‘Trans people have existed throughout history’ (untrue); ‘Clownfish can change sex’ (irrelevant as humans cannot).

Google ‘Starmer cervix’ and watch that famous 2021 interview again. He doesn’t actually know why he thinks it’s ‘wrong’ to say that only women have a cervix. His advisers told him just that, and no more, because they don’t know either. Worse than that, Starmer does not understand the vulnerabilities of the working-class women who will be at the sharp end of his inattention, such as prisoners, rape victims, disabled women, nurses and artists.

Gender ideology destroys everything it touches. It has tarnished the reputations of the NHS, the Guardian, the BBC, numerous celebrities and the UK’s publishing and theatre industries. Will Starmer only snap out of his trance when someone close to him is affected? Believe me, even toolmaking isn’t safe.