Tomorrow's Mail front page: Labour trying to reverse reverse ferret

Reducing or abolishing Corporation Tax and Inheritance Tax.Increase the ceiling for higher tax . Selling off the NHS. Trade deal with Trump. Although they agree with Labour about nationalising steel I think? Oh and stop the boats. Load of Trussonomics. How tf are Labour leaving the door open for these clowns....

Quirks of the FPTP system; it giveth and it taketh away.

Last year, Labour won lots of rural and suburban constituencies where they've never had MPs elected and have little organisation, because voters were sick of the Tory government, and because the rightish vote was split.

Labour also won back the red wall seats they lost in 2019, but on low turnouts and with no enthusiasm.

All those seats would be vulnerable with only a small reduction in Labour support, never mind the tanking we've seen since last summer. There's a by-election coming up in Runcorn, by some metrics one of Labour's safest seats, and Starmer has conspicuously not gone there.

The megapolls and MRP projections are showing that, outside of inner London and Liverpool, there really aren't very many safe seats left for any party. There look like being lots of very tight three-way races.

Due to the quirks of the system, and Reform having support that's quite evenly spread rather than Lib Dem style regional strongholds, you could have Reform at 25% being the biggest party in the popular vote but in third place in terms of seats. Or you could see Reform push up to about 28% and start winning everywhere.

And if there's anti-Labour tactical voting or they leak support on multiple fronts - to Reform, the Greens, the SNP, the Hamas independents - then Starmer really is fucked.

True. The system worked in their favour. It looks like Reform could overcome that for the next one.

(agree with transdimensional)

I suggest you listen to this podcast:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/brand/p09yjmph

then look for info on single sex spaces and FOI results by Ermine Amies on your local NHS Trust. You’ll find they are all gone. There are no single sex spaces left anywhere for any women. It’s not been possible to ask for a woman dr for intimate care without risking your treatment being cancelled. It’s all there in the public domain. Women’s rights removed by stealth. Then come back to discuss

I agree - i genuinely think many REALLY don’t understand what’s happened.

theyre going through stages of something akin to grief; anger, disbelief and a desire to DO something being the current focus. Along the way they’ll eventually learn what they don’t understand. Narc behaviour will drive stubbornness and join the Joylon esque campaign train. Others will read the room and reverse ferret.

I do believe some have been deliberately not putting heads above parapets in order to be at the heart of these groups and leak when the time is right. I know many in the greens who have deliberately done this. I have done this in my own circles with strategic intent.

There is value to playing the long game.

It didn't get Labour a genuine landslide. It split the rightish vote and resulted in the Tories losing votes and seats. The Labour majority only exists because previously-Tory voters voted Reform. Labour aren't actually more popular than they were three years ago.

I think the messages are genuine, but I doubt that Bryant et al have any chance of getting the law changed. From their point of view, what they are worried about is that the EHRC might go further than they think the SC requires. When Eagle says "The ruling is not as catastrophic as it seems but the EHRC guidance might be", she isn't (at least in her own mind) suggesting "defying" the ruling but she thinks that the EHRC will over-interpret it. The word "defying" is editorialisation from the Daily Mail.

I suspect, though, that, like many people, Bryant and Eagle do not yet fully understand all the implications of the SC decision.

Ultimately, I think that the EHRC is more likely than Bryant&Eagle to interpret the SC ruling correctly and that Bryant/Eagle won't be able to overturn the EHRC guidance, and that if they did somehow overturn the EHRC guidance, the courts would be likely to reaffirm the SC ruling.

Starmer is very unlikely to support any attempt to overturn the SC decision legislatively because he knows it would be hugely unpopular.

This. Mainstream politicians have been largely all the same ever since Blair invented New Labour. Reform appear superficially to provide something other than the same-old same-old snouts in the trough out-of-touch political class.

Reasonable piece in Saturday’s Guardian addressed some of this.

Nonetheless, there is anger and disappointment that may well convert into protest votes. My sense is that Labour’s only hope near me is a failure to turn out to vote.

Tbf it got Labour a landslide. But now the support is going. People get fed up and vote parties out.

Labour have just managed to get to that point in 8 months.

If someone tells you they're planning to vote Reform, may I suggest that you lean forward and say 'I'm not sure what Reform has planned. Tell me about its policies, I'm interested.' Most people planning to vote Reform have no idea beside them reducing tax and stopping immigration.

I've met Reform voters on the doorstep when campaigning.

So far they've just been full of anger and grievances with no interest in finding solutions.

It's what distinguishes them - people of other parties can be angry about specific policies but they don't seem to share that determination to believe the worst of everyone.

I don’t think that people who says they will vote for Reform know what their platform is. Or indeed care.

All they care is that Reform are not Labour. Or Conservatives.

Because people aren't able to accept that the country's problems are large and there are no easy solutions.

Reform are promising to fund lower council tax by "cutting DEI"

Which will save about 50p.

I have my criticisms of the government but no one can succeed when a large number of voters are living in a complete fantasy land and blame whichever government is in power for not delivering it.

This: Eagle is actually seeking to find ways to undermine the head of the EHRC. I think that may be reason to have her removed. Did you know that anyone — you don't have to be a Labour Party member — can contact Labour Party HQ and lodge a complaint about the behaviour of any MP, not just their own representative?

Was it David Willets who so lamentably tried to come up with a viable, alternate interpretation of, “He wants our advice“?

I think the dilemma for Starmer is of the your country or your friends variety. He is by instinct a cautious, don’t rock the boat lawyer and a pragmatist rather than an idealist. So you might expect him to thank their lordships for their clarity, and follow the views of the majority of the electorate.

Except that he is also a north London left wing lawyer. And many of his close friends are people who know trans people or have trans children and who believe - because they have to believe it - that trans people must be affirmed. They take at face value that GC feminists are bigots and that it is literal violence to use the word, no.

I think he is ambitious enough that ultimately, he won’t choose to upset the electorate, but he’ll remain on that fence as long as he can, making all the approved noises.

And lots of people have invited Bryant to provide the "correct" interpretation, but he's yet to do so.

Try this. If the trans women get their way all the things women have fought for for centuries, jobs, awards, sports, prisons, (200 years ago Elizabeth Fry got single sex women’s prisons established in law, now the men are back in them and a high proportion are violent sex offenders). Men will be allowed to take over all our spaces and our language. There will be no positive things for women, who are over 50% of the population. A term I heard recently is ‘phallic drift’ 'phallic drift': 'the powerful tendency for public discussion of gender issues to drift, inexorably, back to the male point of view'”. We are fighting the reversal of women’s rights as a sex class.

edit- and the language we use to describe ourselves.

I'm sure the messages are 100% genuine.

Bryant isnt denying the messages exist, just that the section in brackets shouldn't be there, because that is the mails interpretation (which is why it was in brackets) . It's the mails interpretation rather than the existence of the messages that he objects to

What a completely novel criticism that has never been expressed until this moment.

Why don’t you have a crack at presenting the perspective that you want to imagine in good faith and separately lay out your own.

Have a think about whether you’ve at all engaged in spending attention and personal resources that might have been more usefully spent expended in the service of others.

I'm sure the messages are genuine - does anyone seriously think the Mail would make something like this up? (I suppose they could have been fooled by someone faking them, but that's a different matter.) But I agree with PPs who say that a handful of intellectually-challenged MPs who don't understand the Supreme Court ruling are hardly going to persuade Starmer to amend the Equality Act. The man has enough problems on his hands without creating new ones.

Gary Dean Marie https://www.lancashiretelegraph.co.uk/news/5037268.cross-dressing-burnley-burglar-loses-appeal-jail-sentence/

Now called Marie Dean https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/jan/27/marie-dean-trans-prisoner-male-prison-hunger-strike

I am often baffled by the amount of time, attention and activism that is placed on the subject, when the country overall (not just the few thousand who are trans) are crying out for some positive things from Government regarding the NHS, housing, COL and so on.

Can anyone explain?