Labour is betraying women

Key feature of Labour politics, it's not even about ideology, it's all about who's in the club and who isn't. For Diane Abbott, also read Rosie Duffield, who's on the opposite wing of the party but who they also don't see as a team player.

I had a fairly minor role in exposing the SWP rape scandal in 2013. At the time I was talking to a very well connected Labour person, someone party activists would have heard of, and asked if she could imagine something similar happening in Labour.

Her response: absolutely yes. Labour might not have the intense cultishness, but it was very easy to picture them closing ranks around a dodgy man with high status in the party.

My thought exactly. And many others will be pensioners, women living alone who now have to find more money for council tax whilst simultaneously losing their heating allowance. Many will cut their heating and also cut back on food - starving with cold. Oh, well, that'll save on pensions, won't it and the awkward squad ranks will be thinned down.

I think that, if you want to achieve change, you should try to persuade people who disagree with you. And half of how you achieve that is by understanding where they're coming from and why they disagree with you. Even if you suspect they're speaking in bad faith, it's usually more productive to act as if they mean what they say.

But yeah, as someone who comes from the left but has been politically homeless for quite a while, I see a lot of this. My right wing friends might think lefties are silly or naive, but they don't think they're evil. Generally they assume lefties mean well but haven't thought things through. My left wing friends mostly think that conservatives are some kind of offspring of Boss Hogg and The Joker.

You get exchanges like this:

Conservative: The benefits system is full of perverse incentives and doesn't get help to the people who really need it

Left winger: You hate the disabled and want them to die

You can't have a rational conversation on that basis.

I've been having an on-off conversation for ages with a lefty friend who's convinced Donald Trump is a raging antisemite. Now I don't care if you find Trump unacceptable for all sorts of other reasons. But this is a guy whose favourite child is a convert to Orthodox Judaism, who has Jewish grandchildren, who entrusts important business to his Jewish son-in-law. If Trump is an antisemite, he's incredibly bad at it.

My friend is also someone who strongly defended Jeremy Corbyn, which puts his distress at Trump's boomer jokes about Jewish accountants into some kind of context. But this is the point: one man is a member of the tribe, therefore a nice guy deserving the benefit of the doubt, and one is an opponent of the tribe, therefore a monster who can't just be bad in some ways but has to be bad in all the ways.

It's a very strange way of looking at the world. But the Labour stans who come here to scold us seem to really believe it.

Agree.

This is interesting too..

If you are a feminist woman openly critical of Labour you may now be accused of “right wing drift”. This is nonsense. Instead, should scrutiny not be focused on how far Labour have drifted from the left? This is where condemnation should be aimed.

Oh, may you now? I sense a purity spiral implosion.

What is going on in their heads?

Who knows. It feels so mad already and they've barely been in place five minutes. Processing migrants offshore is fine so long as it's Albania and not Rwanda. Rinsing donors is wrong when it's wallpaper but fine when it's Swift tickets or free specs n clothes. Installing chums is wrong when it's Tories who do it but fine when it's Labour.

They're not reversing the two child policy and now it's the winter fuel change. Soon, a major change in the law might come via a private member's bill on "assisted dying". And we already know how dangerous that is from Canada. But let's do it anyway.

I have thought for some time that a significant element of this idea that Labour is the only moral party (or the left., if you like) comes out of a very deeply imbibed narrative that the Conservatives explicitly stand for evil principles.

You see these claims pretty often from such people - that Tory policy is centered around taking away people's rights, hurting the poor in order to enrich the powerful, race essentialism, believing women shouldn't have the vote, etc. Every idea that we might think, gee that is evil, they believe is actually a principle of conservatives or the political right.

Which is to say, they don't know any of the real principles that lay behind conservative thinking.

They'll say things like, obviously Tories are bad for women, they believe we shouldn't have the vote and should be obliged to be at home in the kitchen.

I'm not sure where these ideas come from - the media?

Anyway, it's kind of like saying, the goal of Labour people is to sterilize children. As much as we might think that is what Labour is doing, I think we all know that is not something they actually are trying to accomplish as a goal.

This name is a reflection of the time we were labelled Ultras, partly because we'd anticipated that none of the political parties was willing to listen to women and heed us.

Remember being told how little we understood, and that this was the time for (effectively) unwavering faith?

My only pleasant surprise so far is Streeting. Even then, I'm waiting for the shoe to drop and land more responsibility than ever on women who acts as carers to accept earlier and earlier discharges and to take on more complex care duties. with negligible sources of support, training, nor enhanced resources.

The WFA cut, together with Starmer's enthusiasm for assisted suicide, starts to make it look as if they really dislike the elderly.

It's not just that I'm totally opposed to both policies. It's that I find it hard to believe there's nobody at the top of Labour who could tell Starmer how awful the optics are. Are they actually trying to reach Truss levels of unpopularity?

It is pretty disengenous in all the circumstances.

Labour supporters are completely incapable of holding their party to account. It really doesn’t matter what they do the cult will always decree that the Tories were worse, the press is biased or if neither of those work, it’s the result of a mess left by the Tories.
The guardian (that well known right wing paper) had today revealed that Starmer had taken more gifts and freebies than any other party leader ever…… and the silence is deafening

I work with elderly people and it is all they can talk about,two in their eighties have been out gathering wood for their stove as they are worried about putting the heating on.

Oh my god. This is just awful.

I knew it would be bad,but I didn't imagine that it could be this bad. The cut in WFA will affect more women than men,as women tend to live longer,but no equality assessment or ANY assessment was considered worth carrying out.

I work with elderly people and it is all they can talk about,two in their eighties have been out gathering wood for their stove as they are worried about putting the heating on. Another,an 80 year old widow,is planning on living in one room over the winter,as she's frightened of not being able to pay her bills. If the single person council tax reduction goes,it'll send her into a tailspin of panic.

Some of my FB acquaintances,who were crowing about Labour being in power,have been noticeable by their absence recently. Radio silence from them.
I saw that Starmer got booed and verbally abused at Doncaster races recently,and another of their MPs got booed and asked to leave a pub. Good. They should own it.

I never expected much from Starmer. Really, I expected him to be the British Olaf Scholz, and anyone following Germany knows that the current Scholz administration makes Liz Truss look like some kind of political genius.

Generally I think there's a problem of a political class that can't govern. I'm not sure where that problem comes from, but you see it in multiple countries. And on the right as well as the left, though the right are less prone to try to shame you into tribal loyalty.

I'm in two minds about this as I often am about socfem commentary. On the one hand it's really useful to have criticism of Labour from within the tribe. It can't be written off as easily.

On the other hand, I disagree with the premise that the GII problem can only be solved from the left. I agree with PP that the Labour GC types would have hated it if Kemi had had another 12 months to sort things out. They preferred the mirage of Labour sorting things out. And many of the other great things Labour was going to do are also turning out to be a mirage.

I also have a visceral reaction to the suggestion that being on the left is a token of being a morally better kind of person. I had that delusion knocked out of me long ago, and I find it hard to believe that anyone with experience of left activists can say that and mean it. YMMV I suppose.

Get the train drivers and junior doctors back to work? I believe both of those are male-dominated professions too - in the case of the train drivers, very much so

Medical school graduates are 60% female, and looking at the total number of doctors registered with a licence to practice, we are about at parity.

Just thought I’d point it out, as it took women a long time to get to this point.

Anyone know if ANY females were released early from prison or does that just affect men?

Brilliant article by Jean Hatchet. I agree with every word of that.

Before the election, it seemed to me that the worst nightmare of some of these feminist Labour loyalists was not that the Tories would plunge us into a misogynistic dystopia, but that they would rescue us from it - reverse the effects of GII and bring sanity back. Because in the eyes of those Labour feminists, that really would be the worst thing - for the Tories to get credit for fixing this mess.

if anyone expected them to balance out their lack of sense on identity politics with increased public funding etc they were seriously deluded.

This really needs to be pointed out, frequently for the journalists sitting at the back.

There is still this lingering hope that just because a political party is barking when it comes to identity politics it doesn't mean they won't be absolutely wonderful in other areas and make it all worthwhile.

We see this at political party level, organisational and individual level. It has to be recognised that someone being compromised in this way on this one topic compromises them on all topics. You cannot engage rationally with someone who has declared their own reality.

These are excellent points and I’m willing to bet that none of the Labour policies have been assessed for impacts on women and children.

I am so angry about how women are unfairly penalised for giving birth, breastfeeding and being - still - the primary caregivers in society.

But then, all institutions are profoundly anti-women including the judiciary. Notable when too many female friends and family have become impoverished by the current system once their husbands decided they ‘deserve’ to be happy (with someone else) after 25/30 years of marriage.

Gosh, Jean Hatchett writing about duplicity. And the effects of this on women.

You couldn't make this shit up.

Moira Deeming is in court trying to save her career and reputation as a direct result of Jean and her denouncements of a woman who went out and faced the mob to talk to other women about their children being indoctrinated by the cult. Which has been repeated, added to and blown up ever since.

The fucking cheek of it.

Yep. Totally relate to this.

Sick to the teeth of being told that any dissatisfaction with either Labour or the Democrats wrt to issues relating to women’s rights should be ignored because the alternative is worse.

It’s lazy, and lets them get away with so much.