The truth about Starmer’s ‘changed’ Labour has just been exposed

Yesterday was the eighth anniversary of the appalling murder of Labour MP Jo Cox. It was also the date when a Labour peer sought to make fun of one of his own party’s female candidates by pouring scorn on her fears for her own safety.

Rosie Duffield, who has been the MP for Canterbury since 2017, has been the subject of countless misogynist death threats because of the “gender critical” views that she not only shares with the vast majority of the public, but actually voices publicly. Anyone, particularly women, speaking their mind instead of keeping schtum and going with the flow of the trans ideology that seeps through all the main parties, infuriates the ideologues who have had it their own way for years inside Labour. They would rather see Labour’s only seat in Kent return to the Conservatives than see the re-election of a candidate who believes that physical biology is real and important.

Step forward Michael Cashman, also known as Lord Cashman of Albert Square, a founding member of the trans rights organisation Stonewall and who seems to spend much of his time campaigning to stop men having their feelings hurt by women defending their rights, spaces and sports.

Duffield, who has been sidelined and isolated by her own party’s leadership for insisting that, contrary to Marxist teachings, women cannot have penises and men cannot  have vaginas, has in the past avoided attending her own party conference for fears for her personal safety. Some trans activists – often men – have not only threatened but physically assaulted women they dismiss as Terfs (Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists) so Duffield had a valid reason for avoiding a large gathering of the comrades.

Even in this crucial general election, she has been forced to announce she could not be attending local hustings meetings. Lord Cashman’s response via X? “Frit. Or lazy.”

He has since issued an apology of sorts, refusing even to name Duffield and referring to her in the third person as “Labour’s candidate for Canterbury”, but has not apologised to her personally.

That a high-profile member of the Labour Party would seek to undermine a female candidate’s concern for her own safety after a period in which two MPs have been murdered by ideologues is shocking and, under normal circumstances, unacceptable.

Following the publication of the Cass Review into trans medical services for young people, Labour is considered to have moved from its previous collective policy on trans rights – namely, that a woman is whatever a man imagines one to be and that any man must have the right to occupy any area of life, including changing rooms, toilets, sports and prisons, that were previously reserved exclusively for women. This is difficult to square with its apparent misogyny towards those who won’t play ball with trans ideology.

We are constantly told by Keir Starmer that his great political achievement in the last five years has been to change his party, wresting it from the hard Left and transforming it into a functional, mainstream, centrist vehicle for social democracy. But this row over trans rights and women’s safety suggests that in at least one area, Starmer has failed even to attempt to change direction.

It is bad enough that a female MP feels she would be in physical danger if she attended party conference – remember when a Jewish female MP and a BBC journalist had to hire bodyguards to attend the same event? But the delay in taking disciplinary action against a Labour peer for undermining a candidate and mocking her safety concerns represents a failure of leadership and authority on Starmer’s part.

Starmer likes to evoke comparisons of his own leadership with that of the party’s great election winner, Tony Blair. And yet the former prime minister has just underscored what most of us worked out when we were still at primary school: that men have penises and women have vaginas.

Can Starmer repeat this simple fact publicly? Can he bring himself to defend Rosie Duffield at last?

Dragging his party from its previous hard Left stances was popular, and Starmer was going with the tide. Taking a stand that would be unpopular only with a tiny number of trans activists would demonstrate a genuine commitment to women’s rights and reveal him as someone prepared to face down the mob.

We are still waiting.