Mick Hartley

From the Telegraph:

Sir Keir Starmer has “ended up in the wrong place” on trans issues, Dame Emily Thornberry has said.

The senior Labour MP, who was Sir Keir’s shadow attorney general before the general election, claimed the party had not been “following our hearts” when it came to trans people.

The Prime Minister’s public position on trans issues has significantly changed since he became leader of the Labour Party in 2020, backtracking last year on his previous stance that “trans women are women”.

Dame Emily blamed Morgan McSweeney, the Prime Minister’s former chief of staff who left Downing Street last month, for “trying to push” the Labour Party into political positions that did not come “naturally” to MPs.

She told the BBC’s Political Thinking podcast: “I think we’ve ended up in the wrong place on trans and I think we’ve ended up treading very self-consciously and not ending up following our hearts.”

She has a point. Quite clearly Labour is not happy with the Supreme Court ruling on single-sex spaces. Starmer is not happy back-tracking on his “trans women are women” position. Look what happened to Rosie Duffield, the one woman in Labour who publicly stated that people can’t change sex: she was snubbed by Starmer and was forced out of the party.

She added: “Trans people are on the margins, they are vulnerable. If the Labour Party doesn’t look after trans people, what are we about?”

There you go. She actually believes that. She and most of the Labour Party. And the unions. And the BBC, come to that. They’re still stuck there, while the world moves on.