Before women across the UK had even finished celebrating last week’s Supreme Court ruling on gender, Labour ministers were already plotting to overturn it. After the UK’s highest court stated on Wednesday that a ‘woman’ is defined by biological sex in law, a group of Labour higher-ups began discussing how they could work to reinterpret, undermine or quietly sidestep the judgement.
According to WhatsApp messages leaked to the Mail on Sunday at the weekend, a group chat consisting of various LGBT Labour ministers – including culture minister Chris Bryant and Home Office minister Angela Eagle – began making plans to undermine the Supreme Court ruling as early as Thursday. In one set of messages, MPs attacked Kishwer Falkner, chairwoman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, for stating that only biological women should use women’s single-sex facilities. Labour MP Steve Race described Falkner’s comments as ‘pretty appalling’, to which Byrant wrote, ‘Agreeed’ (sic). Eagle also suggested that MPs should seek a meeting ‘ASAP with [the] relevant equality minister’ after parliament’s Easter recess. She complained that ‘there are already signs that some public bodies are overreacting’. This may have been in reference to the British Transport Police’s announcement that transwomen officers will no longer be able to carry out strip searches of female detainees.
Incredibly, UK prime minister Keir Starmer, who would normally treat disagreement with the courts as akin to treason, has refused to intervene over the plot. A Downing Street spokesman has claimed, rather implausibly, that Bryant and Eagle were not trying to undermine the Supreme Court judgement and so no disciplinary action needs to be taken.
The ruling has – once again – brought Starmer’s slipperiness on the trans issue to the fore. While ministers have publicly welcomed the ‘clarity’ provided by the Supreme Court, it has taken Starmer himself nearly a week to comment on the judgement. Only today did he manage to squeak out that a ‘woman is an adult female’, when questioned during a visit to a school to promote free breakfast clubs. Given that this is the same man who was once adamant that one in a thousand women might have a penis, and that a man can have a cervix, critics are rightly concerned that the Labour government may find ways to circumvent the judgement. Starmer’s meek response will not be reassuring.
The PM has also been silent on the pro-trans protest that took over central London on Saturday. In a temper tantrum of epic proportions, activists encouraged one another to urinate in public, defaced the statue of Suffragist Millicent Fawcett and held banners with menacing phrases such as ‘The only good TERF is a dead one’. Although home secretary Yvette Cooper branded the vandalism ‘disgraceful’, Starmer has refrained from commenting.
His reticence will come as no surprise to anyone who has been paying attention to the trans debate. Starmer knows that endorsing the Supreme Court ruling too vigorously or condemning those misogynistic protests would upset many in his party. Labour has long been the party of ‘trans rights’ and woke ideology. Even members of his cabinet have endorsed some of the most extreme trans positions, such as calling for male rapists to be housed in women’s prisons.
That Labour has become a party that cares more about pronouns than pay packets is a reflection of just how distant it has become from its traditional working-class base. Nowadays, Labour’s MPs, strategists, advisers and activists are all overwhelmingly drawn from the university-educated professional classes. Identity politics, rather than class politics, is their overriding concern.
Letting go of trans ideology is going to be a long and painful process for Labour – if, indeed, it can manage to let go of it at all. Doing so would mean having to acknowledge just how far the party has drifted from its working-class roots, and just how far removed it has become from ordinary Brits and their concerns. It is the same sorry story with Labour’s worshipping of all things DEI and its commitment to the disastrous Net Zero agenda.
As Labour’s pitiful response to the Supreme Court ruling has shown, it has a long way to go before it connects with reality again, let alone with ordinary people. Until it rejects wokeness once and for all, it will remain hopelessly out of touch with those it claims to represent.
Lauren Smith is a staff writer at spiked.
