Labour’s next civil war is a battle over what it means to be a woman

[Hulo]

Full page article in the Evening Standard in London this evening

www.standard.co.uk/comment/comment/labour-s-next-civil-war-is-a-battle-over-what-it-means-to-be-a-woman-a3793541.html

Oops - I just started a thread on this too! Cross post (I did a quick scan to see if anyone else had started one, then you must have posted while I was typing mine).

It's a very good article. As I said in my OP, Kirkup has a real knack for getting to the central meat of the argument without jargon, and phrasing it in a way that is accessible to lots of different groups of people coming at the issue from all sorts of different starting points.

It's a shame the petition wasn't linked but overall a good article.

It’s a good article - very dispassionate.
Ps who are these sad fuckers who “idolise” Owen Jones? Good god youth of today really is going to the dogs

Particularly like the dig at OJ

Reads well in that it covers the key points of the problem for Labour. Powerful conclusion, and the inescapable question in all this.

He's certainly been doing his homework and he has accurately recognised the factional competition in Labour. FINALLY, someone gets it that the current battle is intra-left, despite all the TRA screeches of Nazis and right wingers.

As I've said before, once the right wing properly understands what is going on and stops seeing it as PC eating itself, the TRAs will wish most heartily that they had come to a common solution with the feminist socialists. As A Woman's Place keeps trying to tell them.

A very good article and gently persuasive too.
Great OJ dig too, to odious little root vegetable.

The most bile ridden left-bashing article typical of The Standard.

The right wing are revelling in their triumph, attacking with drop words like "Russia" and "Brexit" reporting the so called inevitable self-destruction of grassroots movements, and so on... bringing in weirdly glamorous photos of Bergorf for capture.

It is pitifully desperate.

Good article. I wish he’d tweet the petition.

Tweet him to ask, Squirrels?

I don't think James Kirkup is revelling in anything. The Momentum/centrist issues are well-known and the attitude to self-ID is a good reflection of the ideological pulls within the party. The video of Shelley Charlesworth being elbowed out in a CLP meeting before she got the chance to speak on self-ID was chilling. Kirkup has described in other articles how the party has been drowning out gender critical voices, so he is hardly jumping on the issue and he backed up Jennifer James for her suspension interview from the party, which she thanked him for. The piece is quite similar to the Helen Lewis one in The Spectator. With the hiring and firing of Bergdorf and now the delay on announcing the AWS decision, it does look to me like Labour are waiting to see which way the wind blows on self-ID. I think the parallel to Brexit, if not Russia is fair.
Anyway, it draws attention to the issue in a mainstream paper. I'll take it.

@boatyardblues I can’t. I’m part of the currently-scared-about-work-reasons lot.

I don’t think anyone will publicly tweet the petition because they’re concerned to be seen supporting groups with a bias. No matter how reasonably worded.

The most bile ridden left-bashing article typical of The Standard

It isn't but for balance here is Matthew Dancona with another perspective on why Labour is unelectable in its present form.

If Corbyn wants to be prime minister, he has to get real about Putin’s Russia

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/18/jeremy-corbyn-vladimir-putin-russia?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Copy_to_clipboard

Some people are just so divorced from reality. There is nothing desperate about the article. It’s a calm view of one of the many internal contradictions bedevilling the left.
There are those on the right pointing fingers and laughing of course - but if you don’t like that, the solution is to stop behaving in a laughable manner.