Politicians respond to the SC judgement

Maybe Starmer was needed to deal with the Brexit fallout (I’m not unimpressed in this) and Streeting to deal with the gender fallout.

Both, IMO, examples of the dire effects of allowing a combination of ideologically driven self interest, delusion and deliberate mischief making to take hold of public discourse.

Wes Streeting is an interesting character.

He's a proper working class boy from the East End, who got good grades and went to Cambridge. Although he's polished up pretty nicely, you can still hear his cockney accent and I imagine he would have stuck out like a sore thumb as an 18 year old next to all the posh kids at Cambridge. His family background is interesting to say the least, which probably makes him pretty streetwise because he'll have seen things that his middle class colleagues in their privileged bubbles won't have seen.

I wonder whether the fact that he's gay made him instinctively pro LGBTQ+ everything and less empathetic towards women in the way that a lot of gay men are, but his colourful background meant that the points made by gender critical feminists hit home with him in a way that they didn't with his colleagues. Perhaps the fact that his own grandmother did time in prison gave him more of a conscience about female prisoners, for example.

Anyway, I am pretty impressed with him at the moment and a future Labour party under his leadership might get my vote. (But I said the same thing about Starmer in the wake of Brexit.)

Lisa Nandy has said the reason she said rapists should go to women's prisons is because she didn't understand the law!

She actually said that rapists should go to a prison of their choosing - which is even worse! Imagine, you commit a terrible crime then get a choice of where you go, FFS.

Agree a good interview. An interesting example given involving the safety of transmen on male wards.

Thanks for sharing this @KnottyAuty

Of all the current senior politicians, he is giving me hope. I see a strong, thoughtful, and fair leader, who isn’t afraid of public humility. He said both “I wish I had listened” and “we’d listened”. His openness is refreshing and powerful. Maybe old former Labour voters like me who have been lost and politically homeless can at last see a person who speaks for them, and, who knows, a way back.

Good interview (Ben Kentish can be very annoying on the issue but good questions and gave Wes time to speak)..

Quite frankly that is what leadership should look like isnt it? Fair, balanced, reasonable. How have we got to the point where this is a surprising thing to hear someone say after all the fever dream stuff that came before?

im putting 16th April in my calendar as For Women Day - lest we never forget

That's a really good interview.

Has anyone posted this yet? Wes Streeting on LBC. Trans issues and refreshing reasonableness from about 18mins. Phew!

He wants to be the next prime minister.

I agree, a powerful thing to say.

Oh god, Nadia Whitome is on Newsnight. As she has nothing to say on any other topic, let's see how it goes.

Matthew Parris agrees:
https://www.thetimes.com/article/405f8a63-6cb9-4ceb-a19f-6d87356b3829?shareToken=46237ee504f1fc226870644cb5eeba0b

In fairness to Wes he seems to have removed splinters from his behind.

He's doing well. Let's see where he goes from here - but he's leading on a subject that frankly should have been lead by Starmer.

Interesting.

The trouble with that is they'd be no one left stupid enough to stand...

Everything Sir Keir Starmer isn’t going to say about the Supreme Court ruling on biological sex has already not been said, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t at least a small bit of masochistic pleasure in seeing him not say it all over again.

😂

Tom Peck in the Times also pointed out today that Lindsay Hoyle didn't call Rosie and said he damn well should have done. Also suggests that Starmer did everything he could to avoid Rosie being given time to ask questions.

https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/rising-panic-keir-starmer-trans-rights-pmqs-0lcq8n0jw

Also this, should maybe go somewhere else but I lost track with all the threads:
https://www.thetimes.com/article/ddf19de7-f1c5-4003-8793-e067490ac843?shareToken=fdceb2de853cc9e2ea5cf420c0f07a30

Alex Massie short report on first minister question time:
https://www.thetimes.com/article/18c47520-54ea-43a8-b53e-1bac8f6d7aeb?shareToken=dc3a7300fc27cfa99e3461ee59aa8556

I don't know how sincere he is but Wes Streeting seems to understand what a future Labour leader will need to sound like.

Alternative realities.

Men are women. There are no problems with this. I didn't say that. That didn't happen. I identify as that evidence not existing.

The whole principle needs to go, along with anyone busy enabling it. One of the biggest problems we have with politics in the UK is the bloody awful calibre of people it attracts and who manage, somehow, to get into positions of extreme responsibility while demonstrating such capacity issues that they'd be sacked from most normal every day jobs.

’I wish we’d listened’ (my italics) is also an implicit dig at his craven, cloth eared colleagues. Nicely done, Wes Streeting - you’ll have to do more than that to get my vote back but it’s a start.

It's incredible that when they reverse ferret, they forget that all the evidence is there on the Internet.

It's not last week's chip paper any more.

I can't decide if it's stupidity, arrogance or both.