Starmer rowing back on self ID - what do we think?

[JohnnyMcGrathSaysFuckOff]

The Times is reporting in its live politics feed that KS has explicitly said Labour will not push for self ID without public backing. I know not everyone can access their content so here is a copied n pasted version: what do you think?

Sir Keir Starmer has shifted Labour’s position on transgender rights as he said the bitter rows over Scotland’s Gender Recognition Bill showed the party must consider public opinion on the issue.The leader of the Labour Party has previously insisted it was committed to updating the Gender Recognition Act to introduce self-identification for transgender people.However, in a significant shift in Labour’s policy, he said the backlash over the SNP’s gender reform bill had made him think again. The SNP passed legislation this year that would make it significantly easier for people to acquire a gender recognition certificate and reduced the minimum age for doing so to 16. The bill was blocked by the UK government.Starmer said: “I think that if we reflect on what’s happened in Scotland, the lesson I take from that is that if you’re going to make reforms, you have to carry the public with you.

“And I think that’s a very important message and I think that’s why it’s clear that in Scotland, there should be a reset of the situation.”

Yep. The problem is the Labour Party have fully shown their misogyny too many times - and it is on record - for random articles about the menopause or listening to the electorate to make any difference.

They have shown they think they know better than women, and that they don't care about normal women's lived experiences. They think the electorate is stupid and not worth listening to. They've lied again and again. They have strongly totalitarian tendancies. Why would I vote for that?

How Rosie Duffield copes with it all day in day out I don't know. She's a real shero.

Just the Labour Party???? I see more examples of that with the conservatives but someway everyone keeps giving them a second chance.

That thread is a really good example of where a lot of pro Labour heads are at.

Dismiss women's concerns because it's a culture war, because she wouldn't have voted Labour anyway, because she's a bad person as there are far more important policies to vote on.

If Labour want to win they need to stop preaching to the converted and broaden their appeal by listening to people who currently won't vote for them instead of dismissing them.

I genuinely think they are in denial about just how angry many women are about this issue and the nearer we get to an election of course the Tories are going to weaponise this and still Labour are giving them all the ammunition they need to do so.

MissLucyEyelesbarrow · Today

^11:59Jezzz · Today 11:24
I've scrolled through all 10 pages. Must have missed it. Could you repost it?^

Here
https://twitter.com/Wommando/status/1639200507171426307?s=20

The trouble is that Wes has not kept abreast about discussions in law. Why not? Stop being lazy. Wes and Kier are clever enough to understand if they bothered, why haven’t they bothered?

Too smug and lazy not to think they know it all already? And that is true of a lot of the Conservatives too.

The Equality Act and Gender Recognition Act are legally rather a mess especially on how they interact.

The exceptions for single sex spaces set out in the Equality Act are no longer recognised as clearly meaning sex by biology. The word ‘biology’ was not mentioned in the original Equality Act because ‘male and female’, which are mentioned are biological states, but people do not necessarily accept that now so there needs to be more clarity.

Lady Haldane in Scotland ruled that someone with a GRC is the sex the certificate says they are and if the Equality Act had meant sex was biological sex it would have said so.

Kier himself said it is the law [that TWAW ] when he was saying you can’t say only women have a cervix.

That is why it needs updating to make clear that sex in the EA is biological.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/mps-to-debate-gender-petition-backed-by-jk-rowling-qh0h0bctk
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/4534821c-bf89-11ed-b52d-512231a0c9aa?shareToken=a2be6368ec3ec1a7a1e413545f54b9d9

As it is, these sex based spaces Wes mentioned, contrary to his understanding, could be interpreted to mean they have to be inclusive of those with fictional (non-biological) ‘sex’ by GRC.

Someone with a GRC could sue if they were discriminated against. (Someone without one even successfully sued the NHS in Sheffield last summer because the judge was institutionally captured perhaps.)

If Labour brings in self-ID GRCs, the number of people obtaining one will expand dramatically and all natal men holding one will be potentially able to lay claim to women’s spaces.

Did Wes say they would not bring in self-ID?

Just the Labour Party???? I see more examples of that with the conservatives but someway everyone keeps giving them a second chance.

Remind me again which party has has had three female prime ministers and which has never even elected a female leader?

It’s not too late to sign the petition to update the Equality Act
https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/petitions_noticeboard/4758082-petition-to-update-the-equality-act-thread-3

Yep. The problem is the Labour Party have fully shown their misogyny too many times - and it is on record - for random articles about the menopause or listening to the electorate to make any difference.
They have shown they think they know better than women, and that they don't care about normal women's lived experiences. They think the electorate is stupid and not worth listening to.
Remember Gillian Duffy?
The idea that the Labour Party knows better than 'bigoted women' is deeply ingrained.

Great explanation.

Yes.

It's odd, really. Calling people who disagreed with them bigots backfired when it came to Brexit. As did trying to please both Brexiters and remainers at the same time.

It seems they have learned nothing from these mistakes.

I'm no Labour fan but if they want to win, they probably need a man at the helm because there is so much hatred for left wing women.

Remind me again which party has wrecked the UK and women's rights over the past 13 years with their corruption, incompetence and lies?

I had far more respect for every woman candidate for the labour leadership race than I did for Starmer following the 'webchats' they all did here.

The women were all entirely in thrall to batshit, but they had the integrity at least to openly state what they stood for and for voters to judge accordingly. Starmer smirked and smugged and said pretty much nothing, with none of their guts.

I'm no Labour fan but if they want to win, they probably need a man at the helm because there is so much hatred for left wing women men in the Labour party treat the women in their party like shit and feel entitled to yell at them and drown out their words when they speak in the commons without apology.

I don't know the answer to this, but from stats I've seen, rape convictions are more and more difficult in many places, not just the UK.

My own feeling is that it reflects, at least significantly, other changes, for example to technology. Rape has always been a crime that can present challenges in terms of providing evidence, and new technological advances seem to have made things more tricky rather than less so.

Sometimes it seems like they don't know how to deal, as a group, with that kind of backlash at all. They seem to be very vulnerable to any kind of claim that they are being unkind to minorities or special groups, to the point where even when they are being reasonable, they still feel the need to apologize, back down, virtue signal.

They need to grow some backbone and realize that sometimes some people might accuse them of being bad.

Has Lisa Nandy done a uturn yet?

No but Wes Streeting seems to have forgotten all about that Facebook (?) group:

twitter.com/Wommando/status/1639200507171426307

Wes Streeting is a man who can express 6 mutually contradictory opinions before breakfast. Give him my vote? I wouldn't give him the steam off my shit.

It's a complicated question. Actual conviction rates - i.e. the percentage of defendants found guilty if the case gets to court - are increasing and are higher than most other violent crimes - link.

However, when people talk about conviction rates, they usually actually mean the report-to-conviction rate, ie the % of cases reported to the police that get to trial and conviction. This is very affected by the number of charges laid, which has fluctuated quite a bit, even if you ignore Covid.

There are further complications in all this because the number and type of reported rapes fluctuates as well. For example, there were increases in the number of historic rapes reported around the time of MeToo and Operation Yewtree. These are usually harder to charge and convict so you would expect to see a lower report-to-conviction rate.

But the bottom line is that, until Covid, there seems to have been no significant difference between Tory and Labour administrations over all in the absolute number of cases charged. There was a dip in charge rates in 2018-19, so pre Covid, but there was a similar dip in 2007-08 under Labour. The percentage of cases that result in a conviction if they get to trial is better under the Tories than Labour.

And someone has found their VAWG green paper in which they want to include sex and gender on hate crime. Which means adding "gender" as a protected characteristic, which erases sex, which would be a disaster for women:

twitter.com/moviefeminist/status/1638936464997187584?s=46&t=WHoOZ_3Kv5G6-FyQuvE0LQ

"Labour wants to go further by including sex and gender in the list of protected characteristics in hate crime laws for the first time." on page 8

labour.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Ending-Violence-Against-Women-and-Girls-Green-Paper.pdf?1

If they do get into power, every piece of legislation that is vaguely related will need to be checked to make sure they aren't getting thing done under the radar.

Thank you MissLucyEyelesbarrow that’s really interesting. So the assertion that the Tories have “practically decriminalised rape and sexual assault” is probably a bit misleading.

I think so though, of course, the percentage of reported cases that get to trial has been desperately low and very worrying for many years

Yes it’s shockingly bad.

Just listened to that. To we detect panic on this issue at Labour HQ?

I haven’t listened but if so, good. They should have listened earlier rather than spend far too long scoffing at, insulting and minimising women.