Major win for Labour Women's Declaration

[fromorbit]

Major Development Starmer has finally agreed to talk to Labour Women's Declaration and listen to their concerns after women talked to him at The Labour Women's Network Gala Dinner. If he sticks with this this means the era of No debate in Labour is totally over.

This looks to be a big win for women and owes everything to those who spent years on this and especially everyone who argued with canvassers about RespectmyX. Starmer can't have missed the pressure. Your voices were heard! You all changed the course of the second most powerful party in the UK.

See this tweet from Joan Smith earlier in the evening: twitter.com/polblonde/status/1527010428764704768

Later Details from LWD Here:
twitter.com/LabWomenDec/status/1527018832229015553

This doesn't mean Starmer or others are going to do what LWD will say or they can be trusted. Nothing can be taken for granted. What happens going forward as always relies on how strong and how loud those who back women's sex based rights in the party are. Lots of battles ahead.

What it does potentially mean is we have a chance for Open Debate at all levels of the party via leadership endorsement and it will be a game changer. Gender Crits may get a proper chance to be heard, but we will be fighting to win support. Have no doubt it would be a vicious long battle like any policy debate inside Labour. However given what LWD has achieved so far you would be foolish to think that these great women and their supporters inside and beyond the party can't pull it off. Especially as the news of Starmer simply talking to LWD may inspire mass resignations from those opposing us. Debating reality openly is not their strong point.

This is the start of a bigger struggle, but a great achievement. I know many reading this will not be ready to trust Labour again and you shouldn't be without proof.

What you should trust though is the strength of Labour women to try to make a difference in the party, it isn't the first time they have had to fight through sexist nonsense, and nothing is going to make them give up.

Yes this.

Go on Starmer, make a fuss about male rapists in women's prisons or males in women's sports or the recent issue about the schoolgirl bullied out of a school. DO something that shows you give the tiniest flying fuck about women's and children's rights.

I won't hold my breath.

I have huge respect for the women plugging away in the Labour party but it would take a lot for me to vote Labour ever again. I just don't trust them. I trust Boris more than them and that tells you a lot (I don't trust Boris).

For Labour to regain any credibility on this then quite a lot of the top tier are going to have to explain how and why they spent the last few years proclaiming their belief in utterly batshit mental ideas and how, given that, they expect to be taken seriously on anything at all in the future. Labour are, and remain, fucked.

There is no new party magically coming to save us. That means fighting to reclaim the parties that already exist by supporting MPs, Councillors, Lords who can see reality and will fight for it

This.

Me too.
They have a golden bridge to tiptoe across before I will waste my vote on a party silent in the face of the catastrophe happening to children in the grip of this ideology and the removal of the fundamental rights of women to safety, privacy, sport and the rest.

But thank you to all those Labour Women - I do not want to spoil my vote at another election.

Parliament can, and has, passed daft laws and nothing women do in the Labour Party will change that. Taken to it's logical conclusion women should join the conservative party and work within that to make it more human, because that is the party that is not only currently controlling legislation but likely to go on doing so.

Labour will only change if Starmer thinks it will lose him an election and joining labour wont do that. I do admire the women who will stay and fight for labour but it's become a party totally divorced from reality with no real interest in being re-elected.

Good. We want ‘women are a distinct biological class’ to become the mainstream political position. It doesn’t need to be a battleground! It is just common sense.

I agree with others - Labour has a lot of rowing back to do on this. However, we need to make it as easy as possible for them to do this (or make it untenable for them not to!)

Well done, I know it has taken a lot of persistence to get this far. Its one step forward in what is going to be a very long haul. Good luck with the meeting.

Me neither. How disgusting that he wouldn't engage before now. I would love to know who has paid all the leftwing parties off.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Great post @MangyInseam

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.

100% agree

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!

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.

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.

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

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.

Good news ...

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.

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.)