Major win for Labour Women's Declaration

"Labour almost certainly doesn't need our votes" - usual wishful thinking rather than an adult assessment of the position. The rising cost of living may bring some voters back to Labour but the tories have stacked the deck with boundary changes and Labour need every vote they can get. Even if - and it's still a big if - they get to be the largest party the ability to achieve anything depends on the other parties believing another election shortly afterwards wouldnt give Labour a better result.

The local election results were not great, Labour needs both to get all its past supporters out and win more. It's failing on both.

I'm sure everyone here has voted for a party that doesn't align 100% with their beliefs. That's quite different than saying that you now see that there is a bigger problem underlying what seems like a policy error, and that correcting the obvious error doesn't adress that.

Lib Dem Councillor weighs in. Predictable

twitter.com/Alexa_Kantor/status/1527579856938184705?s=20&t=sqCM_nFKrjOuGZJivtU8WA

someone who gets a chance for a chat with Sir Keir should ask him, "Are trans women acceptable on all-women shortlists, yes or no?" I think he'd prefer not to answer that.

I can do the answer to that, no need to bother Starmer. You give the questioner a sad and reproachful look and tell them "It's complicated". Muttering hopefully about 'dog whistles' can also be useful to boot the tricky stuff into the long grass and out of sight.

I would guess that this is an attempt to bring back some of the women while not alienating the pro-trans mob. And maybe some of their most aggressive leaders have been warned to keep the protests down, to make this seem more successful. But someone who gets a chance for a chat with Sir Keir should ask him, "Are trans women acceptable on all-women shortlists, yes or no?" I think he'd prefer not to answer that.

100% all of this. Many of my objections to gender ideology are out of sheer pedantic insistence on adhering to truth, facts, reality and evidence.

The suppression of rational debate and denial of simple scientific reality is enough, as far as I can see, to shift a party from pragmatic politics into the realm of faith-based groupthink.

I see my post at 8:03 got a bit mangled. What I meant to say was: 'Misrepresenting what we are saying is not going to win back our votes.'

I have a lot of time for Labour Women's Declaration and no wish to piss on their chips. However I'm also tired of being presented as if we're ideological purists.

In 2019 when I heard John McDonnell had agreed to talk with WPUK, I thought it was a massive breakthrough. When Labour went on to pledge in their manifesto that they would protect single sex based exemptions, I took them at their word and voted for them. Wiser heads than mine counselled that the promise was meaningless without clear definitions of 'sex' and 'women' but I did not believe my party would be so slippery.

After the election we saw senior Labour figures - some of them would-be leaders - signing a pledge denouncing WPUK as a hate group, and it became clear to me that the manifesto had been taking the piss. I consider that to be breakthtakingly cynical behaviour, especially from a party that's now trying to position itself as honest and decent.

Has it left me wary? Fuck yes. But even now, all I want from Labour is a clear reassurance that they will uphold my rights. Why on earth would I vote for a party that won't do that?

Saying that you won't vote Labour unless their position is exactly 100% as you want it

And in this context, that's rather like saying to women, 'ok, we'll remove all your rights, disappear you in law and create a system of systemic male supremacism in which you'll be a kind of subclass in the UK, and ok that totally sucks to be you, but what about our fabulous plans for libraries and for tax reform?'

Its all very 'apart from that Mrs Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?'

Saying that you won't vote Labour unless their position is exactly 100% as you want it

I'm happy to vote for a party that I don't 100% agree with but there are some fundamentals - and for me one of the fundamentals is that women are females, and humans can't change sex. (No David Lammy, men can't grow a cervix ffs.)

Well done LWD.

It is incredibly galling that this has to be celebrated as a victory. But as others have said, you have to work with the system we have. That’s why I’m still hanging on as a Labour Party member. It makes me rage that I was forced to vote for Starmer because he was the only leadership candidate who wasn’t signing pledges about “hate groups” only for him to spout the nonsense he has, but the tide can’t turn if everyone leaves.

The TRAs have not achieved their success by boycotting parties and spoiling ballots and nor will GC supporters. I looked up the number of spoiled ballots locally - it’s tiny. @HPFA is right. Labour may be the largest party next time and will be under pressure from Lib Dems, SNP on this issue, so the more it can be challenged internally the better.

Even if you think Labour are doomed electorally, if their position shifts in a more sensible direction, then the Tories will have to work harder. At the moment the Tories just have to state the blindingly obvious from time to time, to own this issue.

Good news ...

God news, and great respect for the women who achieved this. But I'll believe (and vote) Labour again when I see action, not just words.

Do people actually look at election results and opinion polling?

The current polling for Labour/LibDem/Green stands at about 55-60% and both sets of Local Elections results in 2021 and 2022 show that people are increasingly willing to vote tactically to prioritise getting this appalling government out. The LibDems probably have a worse position on the issue than Labour but it's not stopping them gaining ground in Conservative areas. At present not only do the Tories not seem to have a clue how to turn this around, they seem to be making it actively worse for themselves.

So, to be brutal, Labour almost certainly doesn't need our votes (by "our" I mean GC women like myself).

It would, however, be in Labour's interests to have a policy on the issue that the majority of people find acceptable and commonsensical without causing too much uproar among its own activists. That is what Keir Starmer is currently searching for. We probably won't find it "good enough" but I would sooner Labour went into an election with a position that at least had something in it for us rather than sweet FA.

And if you think that there are enough people whose votes will be influenced by this issue for "scorched earth" tactics to make sense I suggest you look at what has happened to Alba who also had that idea.

www.gbnews.uk/news/alex-salmonds-alba-party-humiliated-as-every-candidate-defeated-in-local-elections/288480

Yes. I'd like to follow the money trail too.

Their ability to lie about basic biological facts is worrying for lots of reasons, not just women's rights. It's the lying that's the problem for me, more than anything. If they'll lie about something as uncontroversial and evidenced as the sex binary what the hell WON'T they lie about.

Plus the punishing people for not going along with lies - authoritarian and disturbing. That's not a good look and the Tories are better about that. They generally allow dissent.

How could they possibly think they'd do better in a pandemic if they're willing to just ignore science for ideology? Covid knows the difference between male and female bodies.

Saying that you won't vote Labour unless their position is exactly 100% as you want it
Representing what we are saying is not going to win back our votes. I wish Labour Women's Declaration well. I simply want Labour to commit unequivocally and unambiguously to upholding single sex spaces. This is current legislation. It's an embarrassingly modest request.

I wouldn't trust Starmer to sit the right way on a toilet seat, but that doesn't mean this isn't a significant win.
It means our voices have been loud enough that he feels he has to listen.
This was never something that was going to be solved quickly but rather in a series of steps and this is a big one.
Well done Labour women!

100% agree

At the moment Labour is likely to be the largest party in the next government. That's why things like this are important. Saying that you won't vote Labour unless their position is exactly 100% as you want it just means you give them no incentive to move to a better position.

FWIW I haven't seen much reaction to this from the usual suspects - there may be a tacit recognition that "No Debate" is no longer tenable which is very good news.

Great post @MangyInseam

There needs to be a credible opposition for the state to function, so somehow the change has to happen or it's going to lead to serious, more serious, problems.

But what has happened has gone well beyond just a bad policy. The difficult is what else it has revealed about Labour MPs and their thought processes, and more importantly, how they see their role, how they see the electorate, how they understand the structure of society. They are fully committed to ideological purity around their vision of a supposed Utopian society, they are not very committed at all to democratic representation, and they are deeply immersed in identity politics and it's lens with all policy issues.

There are a lot of people who, having seen this, will be loathe to support them until it changes. Which will likely take more than one election cycle and quite a few of their MPs replaced for people without the same baggage.

At PMQs this week, Boris Johnson's comeback to Starmer's accusation of dithering over a windfall tax on the fuel companies was to remind the house that "the right honourable gentleman struggled to define what a woman was."

The more the Tories use this as ammunition (and they will) the more ridiculous Starmer is going to look.

Me too. I hope, more than I can say, that they will succeed.

Well done to LWD. I so desperately want to vote Labour again but as with others won't unless they drop self id.

As a start Id like to see Keir Starmer publicly supporting Rosie Duffield & defending her when she’s under yet another attack from the TRA

The thing is, I don’t dislike Starmer. I think he’s basically a decent bloke. But unfortunately he’s swallowed a giant pile of shite about gender ideology, which suggests he’s less intelligent than he wants us to think he is, because there is no factual basis for the core claims of the movement he supports. I feel we need someone clever (as well as decent) running the country and I think he’s on the average side.