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

[teawamutu]

Fuck sake is this ever going to be over?

Please tell me this is bollocks to hold Starmer's feet to the fire, somebody?

https://x.com/MailOnlineScot/status/1913702114129330408

He’s the PM !!!
This shouldn’t be personal. He needs to be professional about this

Its not like the SC has changed anything. No one’s taking away trans rights.

Starmer needs to speak up in support of the Supreme Court ruling …..what is wrong with him. !

…..what is wrong with him. !

He’s a spineless, grasping little shit who’s incapable of telling the truth or saying sorry.

HTH

💐

"At this point in time, the EHRC is still waiting for a formal response from Labour. "

They’re on holiday and clearly think it’s not important enough
or is it that women aren’t important enough 🤔

I am concerned about Labour and Starmer. It’s Baroness Falkner that WhatsApp group are after.

She has been targeted before. She’s only still there thanks to KB stepping in.

I get Starmer is politically craven but then posters saying he definitely won’t do various things doesn’t wash anymore, look at this site before the welfare cuts. Loads of pro Labour posters saying that wouldn’t happen.

That it was media / scaremongering etc. They were wrong.

I have been open and vocal about my thoughts on this subject with my circle of friends.

Then one of them who has come out as trans. He's 6'3". He's had two names (so far) which I think has further unsettled things. He's been a dick about pronouns and thrown a tantrum about his parents not being supportive enough (they tried to have a honest conversation about women being disadvantaged and a conversation about how being 6'3" he's never ever going to pass because they are concerned about his future opportunities. He also had a gf but she dumped him when he decided to transition and expected to be called a lesbian so they had to sort of talk him through the realities of that). They have bent over backwards to support him and have only made mistakes with the pronouns.

I have noticed this and commented that it's ok for them to have their own feelings and own understanding of sex/gender rather than go mad over it.

But yes it's now a sensitive subject I can't go near because it's so close to the bone.

I have told another friend privately, that I suspect the son will distance himself pretty quickly from them despite them desperately trying to maintain the relationship due to the cultlike pattern this activism displays. I said to keep an eye out on them because I wouldn't be able to be the one to support them because of my own situation. That seems to be playing out unfortunately and he's already rarely in touch anymore and doesn't respond to messages.

I can completely get why it has such an effect in the workplace - people really don't want to upset or create a conflict because it's not the place to do it and maintain a good working relationship. This is why politics and the workplace really don't mix.

It's bloody awful.

Why would any of us be HOPING that there is a threat to the SC judgement??

What an odd and dismissive comment in a time when we know that there are MPs and Ministers unhinged enough to do exactly that.

A number of senior people including Harriet Harman have been minimising and briefing to undermine the judgement from the minute it was handed down so imo we’d be stupud not to be extremely suspicious and vigilant for this behaviour.

The question is, why aren’t you? Are you being extremely trusting and believing that this is all settled now? Because that would be utterly misplaced.

The EHRC didn't get anything wrong, they had to apply guidelines in line with the law as written.

The EHRC published guidance in line with how they thought the law was written. They were wrong. The guidance was wrong. Baroness Falkner was wrong. Anyone who argued that men with a certificate counted as a woman for the purpose of the EA was wrong.

Someone on another thread posted this - was a useful summary and a good tune - about Starmer’s ruthlessness:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CvP0Turzy7g

She is due to leave the EHRC anyway: her time in office was fixed. It's already been extended by a year, till November this year. I imagine she'll be hugely relieved to step down, knowing that despite everything the TRAs threw at her (including her own staff trying to get her dismissed) she managed to steer the EHRC back to reality.

I got an email from someone there over the bank holiday while on leave. I imagine the SC ruling has ruined a lot of holidays this year

Latest is - After being given several attempts by the Mail to comment, No 10 refused to say anything on the record about the PM’s view of the ruling.
A source simply said: ‘His position is the very clear Government position as we issued this week.’

The political fact is Starmer has to say something very soon. He is going to be asked about it in Parliament and Parliament returns from recess tomorrow and in interviews. It is the Daily Mail front page today!

He obviously doesn't want to talk about it. He never has.

However the Death threat placards and statue vandalism have changed things.

Because Kemi is going all in on this and the death threats have made her position stronger. It is an easy win for her because of what she said and did in the past.

Attacking Starmer on potentially causes turmoil inside Labour and Lib Dems while the TAs inside the Tories are completely sidelined now.

Remember the Council elections are 4 weeks away.

Good summary of the situation right now with statements from women's orgs:

Sir Keir Starmer under mounting pressure to publicly back Supreme Court gender ruling on what a woman is after five days of silence - amid growing concerns about plotting by his own ministers to defy the landmark judgement

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14629945/Sir-Keir-Starmer-mounting-pressure-court-gender-ruling.html

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5yl9ndk124o

The GRC bit was always confusing. The SC ruling was needed to clarify just that part - however the huge upset is because it’s slammed the door on gender self id practices which have become default by stealth. (ETA self ID was never the law and everyone knew it but carried on anyway) That never needed clarification and the 2022 guidance tried to show how single sex spaces could by justified. Unfortunately no one listened. It seems that the EHRC have been trying to get the NHS to follow the law for a long time and been ignored. We need to support the EHRC and not try to tear them down at this point.

If you want to help then come over to the NHS Policy Audit thread… [blatant plug]. Once we have proved the NHS took all single sex exemptions away by stealth, it will GIVE the EHRC leverage. They need our help. They’re one of the few institutions who want to get this sorted out

Absolutely. To every word you say.

There is no merit it Labour taking a side. The leaks seem to suggest that some MPs want to do that, by siding with TRAs.

I don’t view it as ‘fence sitting’ to state that solutions are needed to ensure that everyone can navigate society safely and with dignity. KS has said that he welcomes the clarity provided by the SC. A balanced stance would be to say that he will welcome guidance that clarifies legal protections for single sex provision and will also expect guidance to ensure that trans people are afforded with the protections that deliver dignity and safety for them too. TRAs will view this as transphobic, but the MPs who object will find it hard to win support if KS’s stance is demanding transwomen are equally protected.

We need to support the EHRC and not try to tear them down at this point.

I’m not trying to tear the EHRC down and I’m more than happy to support them. I think that Baroness Falkner is an amazing woman who has bravely stood up for women against a tirade of misogyny and hatred. This doesn’t change the fact that the EHRC got the law wrong and pretending otherwise is just weird. There’s no shame in it. The law was a confusing mess and it was always strange when people said it clearly said one thing or another.

No10 want the story to go away.

The reality is it's one of those stories that a) there is genuine widespread public interest in despite protests to the contrary - not because it's about women's rights, but also because it represents institutional out of touchness and a breach of public trust which is the overarching political trend of the moment b) it's a story that will just keep giving and there's no shortage of new angles and new materials.

I actually think No10 strategists still thought this was a niche issue that would just disappear if you just ignored it, like the Labour Brexit fudge.

The difference is that the Labour Brexit fudge was only possible because they were in opposition and it was the Tories who had to take action. It allowed Labour to basically sit on the problem. This issue goes back to a lot of the public disaffection and loss of trust in government and public institutions that led to Brexit in the first place and remains unresolved.

We've been warning about this for some time.

Now Labour is finding themselves in a position where action is not only required but required very quickly and they will have to show their hand because hospitals for example don't close and this issue will be a live daily one. There's also the numerous court cases in progress where the ruling is of direct relevance.

Labour have three choices - opt for a change in the law, which won't necessarily have enough internal support to pass and is politically suicide in the face of Reform or act decisively and put the ruling into practice.

The third is the fudge. The fudge is the worst of all worlds and relies on a lack of public scrutiny and dividing groups. Introducing more mixed sex facilities saying there a lack of public demand is one option (and there needs to be an awareness of this - followed by a demonstration of harms and a vocal chorus of this not being acceptable to the public) or trying to use yet another illegal policy that probably won't fully satisfy transactivists anyway and risks even more law suits.

I do think there has been a catastrophic misjudgement of the subject and what it is about though - I stress that it's not just about women's rights, not is it about trans rights. It's about something much wider than that.

Developments. The TAs inside Labour are losing ground.

Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has called the vandalism of several statues in Parliament Square, including one of women's votes campaigner Dame Millicent Fawcett, "disgraceful". Transgender campaigners gathered on Saturday to protest against the Supreme Court ruling that biological sex defines a woman for the purposes of the Equality Act.

Home secretary calls damage to statues disgraceful
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crkx78zlm4po

A spokesperson for Women and Equalities Minister Bridget Phillipson, speaking on the damage to Dame Millicent's statue, said she "utterly condemns the appalling defacement of such an important national monument to the fight for women's rights".
"There is no excuse for this disgraceful criminal damage."

Phillipson and Cooper don't mention the death threat signs so far. That can't last.

When is the guidance due?

Before the summer, I believe.

Easy enough to bamboozle the public over Brexit because the issues around it were political, legal, financial, commercial and generally difficult to understand, especially for a population with no clear idea of how its own political system works, let alone the complexities to do with our relationship with the EU.

However, most people are pretty clear about male and female, the need to safeguard children and fairness in sport, among other things. So the Government needs to act quickly and decisively or lose a great deal of support.

KS has consistently said he wants ‘less heat’ in relation to the issues, suggesting that the ‘heat’ comes from the stoaking of culture wars, as opposed to it arising because it genuinely matters to people.

He isn’t going to be able to push it to one side anymore, as the SC ruling has clarified a position that is not reflective of everyday practice in the public sector (which he is in charge of). I don’t think there is appetite, or capacity in light of other priorities, to review and redraft legislation. To avoid this, he can set the expectation that the SC is fully complied with and that solutions are found so those with the protected characteristic of gender reassignment are protected and ‘welcomed’.

Thanks. So it looks like Baroness Falkner should be there, unless Labour mobilise against her.

Who did that last time until KB stepped in, I can’t recall. Maybe just within the organisation.

JKR adds to the pressure on Starmer

mol.im/a/14631205