Oh god, Labour again.

Well if someone thought sticking this back up on the web site was some sort of back door method to put Labour on the TWAW side, it seems to have back fired. And made Labour (in its current reincarnation) as lets pretend their isn't a problem because we are all about "equality"!

The Wayback Machine record of the page is interesting.
The statement was still up on 30 October 2019 when the general election was confirmed.
The next attempted snapshot was on 6 Dec - the page was not found.
On 13 December, the day after the election, the page is up again.
Coincidence?

I've written to my Labour MP. Even if it is an older statement, it has not, to my knowledge, been replaced by a new one.

I think OJ’s article is laughably wrong BTW.

Joe Biden managed to hold together a coalition against Trump by avoiding culture war spats in a country where culture wars are not the same. I don’t see Biden mentioning abortion rights or maternity pay much.

It’s also easy to reverse an EO.

OJ needs to think more about Dec 2019.

I suspect that some random staffer, working from home, decided to make something out of nothing...in order to align with the trends in the U.S - which the Guardian, amongst others, is very keen we should do.
Today's Guardian has a piece by OJ on how central the 'Culture Wars' are to " progressives" in the U.K.

I'm really sensing an acceleration, recently, in the mergence of the mouthpieces of the British left with the self styled 'progressives' of the U.S. The language, terminology, everything.

So ironic - given the traditional distaste and even hatred for all things American on the British left.

It only becomes Fake News
When Labour publish a statement saying that
Women are adult human females

How and why on earth has it reappeared on Labour's website then? They need to be looking into that!

They do.

I think official Starmer policy is ‘stay away from culture wars’. However I don’t think the Conservatives will allow him that option, so sooner or later he will need to state an opinion.

This would be so much easier if the test for supporting trans right wasn’t ‘TWAW’, which can’t be explained in any coherent way.

[quote fastwigglylines]WPUK said:

"We have been assured that LP NEC statement in circulation is not current policy. It has been replaced by the manifesto of 2019 which is clear: “Ensure that the single-sex-based exemptions contained in the Equality Act 2010 are understood and fully enforced in service provision".

"We are not clear how this old statement has reappeared on the LP website but we understand it will be corrected."*

www.twitter.com/Womans_Place_UK/status/1354887828472270857[/quote]
How and why on earth has it reappeared on Labour's website then? They need to be looking into that!

[quote ListeningQuietly]Remember that although the Tories accept what women are, we are expected to know our place ....
www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-55844367[/quote]
But at least the Tory party aren’t trying to destroy our class completely! And we already know there are some allies in powerful positions in the Tory party.

We can’t fight back at all, ever, if we can’t even define the group being trampled.

I was a Labour voter until the last election. I will not vote for my daughters erasure, and as bad as I find some Tory policies (I’m disabled, and have had to fight at a tribunal to get back what I was entitled to) I still will put women’s rights first.

Every time. Even with this shot show of a government.

If Labour shows me even the slightest whiff that they can manage to figure out who has birthed every human being in history, I’ll return.

So if it's not true, what's the criterion for being on an AWS or being a Women's Officer?

Actually, Labour Women's Declaration have found out the statement is from 2018.

www.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=283389716454039&id=101732797953066

If you want to consider whether all women's shortlists are making an impact it the figures you want are what proportion of each party's MPs are women, so 24% of conservative MPs and 51% of Labour MPs.

It's not about whether they are a good thing or not, it's the fact that Labour are quite happy to have men holding positions specifically for women, such as women's officers.

I am so fed up that no left-wing party is willing to stand up for women, even the WEP.

WPUK said:

"We have been assured that LP NEC statement in circulation is not current policy. It has been replaced by the manifesto of 2019 which is clear: “Ensure that the single-sex-based exemptions contained in the Equality Act 2010 are understood and fully enforced in service provision".

"We are not clear how this old statement has reappeared on the LP website but we understand it will be corrected."*

www.twitter.com/Womans_Place_UK/status/1354887828472270857

THIS IS FAKE NEWS, people!

The statement is from 2019. Labour's changed the policy since then. No one's quite sure why it started circulating yesterday.

The proportions of Labour/Conservative MPs read differently depending on which figures you use because there are more Conservative MPs. 87/220 or 40% of female MPs are Conservative but that is only about a quarter of all Conservative MPs.

220/650 MPs are female so about a third.

I'm not in favour of quotas or All Women Shortlists. I see three big problems with them.

1. They fail to consider or address the underlying causes as to why women aren't becoming MPs. In other words, AWS tackle the symptoms, not the cause. This has been proven by the inclusion of mtf transitioners onto the shortlists. Many of the reasons why women might find it difficult to become an MP (esp anything to do with childcare) would almost not apply to an mtf transitioner. The fact that Labour don't seem to understand why AWS exist is concerning.

1. I think they mean some people are less likely to take the women seriously: 'oh she's just there because she's a woman' - remember the 'Blair's Babes' label? Personally, I would never stand on an AWS and find the idea rather insulting. I would want to win 'fair and square', against all candidates including men. (I realise others view these shortlists differently).

1. They open the door to other quotas and shortlists, e.g. shortlists for only disabled people or only lgbtq people or only people from a bame background. I'm all for widening access to politics. I don't consider a succession of PMs from Eton and other public schools to be in any way desirable. However, a succession of politicians that are there primarily because of their ability to meet tick-box criteria does not sound like a great way to solve the problem. It just undermines the achievements of candidates who are brilliant and who happen to be from an underrepresented background, while running the risk of allowing people through who never would have succeeded in an open race because they weren't good enough.

I don't think Keir Starmer is doing a good job. However, given that he at least demurred from signing a pledge that Nandy and RLB signed either without reading or understanding what they were signing, I still think he was the best of a bad bunch.

I wonder how much the defeat of the AWSL court case has made them more overt?

Yes I thought that.

@MissBarbary -

No. AWS is an awful idea.

At the moment at Westminster Conservatives have 40% women ; Labour 47% ; SNP 7% and Liberal Democrats 3% so AWS isn't even making that much of a difference.

Sorry but on the numbers you're wrong, by a long way.

commonslibrary.parliament.uk/general-election-2019-how-many-women-were-elected/

"Of the current 220 women MPs, 87 are Conservative (24% of all Conservative MPs, up from 21% in 2017). 104 are Labour (51%, up from 45% in 2017), 16 are SNP (33%, down from 34% in 2017) and seven are Liberal Democrat (64%, up from 33% in 2017). There are also six female MPs amongst other party groups."

The proportion of Labour MPs that are women is OVER TWICE that of the Conservatives. I do have some reservations about AWS but it's undeniable that in increases women's representation.

The lib dem number is interesting, but if I remember rightly prior to 2017 they had NO female MPs at all. Would be interested to find out more about what they've done (if anything) to change that, but with so few MPs in total it may be a random by-product of small sample size.

It makes me laugh (albeit a sad, hollow laugh) how many people on here were adamant that Keir Starmer was secretly on the GC side, that he had to hold his cards close to his chest and only once he was elected could he then slowly restore sex based rights.

I still have no idea why anyone thought that, and never been more gutted to be proved right, as Labour under him is even bloody worse!

At least the others had the integrity to be upfront and honest about their determination to do away with our rights.

Sees like some people are glutton for punishment, reminds me of an abused puppy going back to its owner, only to cry out at getting another kicking

On the face of it, I think it seemed that AWS could be an effective way to encourage more women into politics. It seemed to actually help with that for the LP in a real way. As a policy it's only justifiable so long as it seeks, and is effective, at redressing an imbalance. And even then there is a reasonable argument that they are discriminatory and should not be used even if they have the intended effect.

But given that it doesn't put Labour all that far ahead in terms of female MPs, and the lack of quality candidates for leadership roles, you do have to ask whether it is actually meeting that bar of being effective, whether that approach relates to the lack of female leadership or is just ineffective at promoting it, and whether some other approch might work better.

At the moment at Westminster Conservatives have 40% women ; Labour 47% ; SNP 7% and Liberal Democrats 3% so AWS isn't even making that much of a difference.

And of course the Conservatives can point to their 2- nil lead on female leaders and PMs.

Labour had the first female Home Secretary in Jacqui Smith- the Tories have had Theresa May, Amber Rudd and Pritti Patel. May was , I think, the longest serving Home Secretary apart from Alan Johnston. There's never been a female Chancellor and I don't have time tonight to check the other Great Offices of State.

While I'm as aghast at this as anybody, surely it's worth bearing mind - for those insisting that "thank God Labour will never win", "they've lost my vote" etc. - that it's only Labour that HAVE all women shortlists at all, and the proportion of Labour MPs that are women is much higher than the proportion of Tories, largely for that reason.

Sadly we live in a two-party system where neither party will ever live up to everything you want. Surely a party with an imperfect mechanism to improve women's representation is better than one without such a mechanism at all?