Starmer is ditching yet another one of his "principles". The guy is a flip-floppin' fraud.

This time Labour's leader is ditching his support for gender self-ID. But instead of backing women he is now sitting on the fence, claiming he will build a "consensus" on the bitterly contested issue

Photo by Fernando Gonsales on Unsplash

TOM Harwood of GB News has a great scoop today - Keir Starmer has dumped yet another one of his virtuous and principled stances; this one on trans self-ID.

In 2020, Starmer promised to “introduce self-declaration for trans gender people”. But Harwood has got hold of the relevant section of the current Labour policy handbook and that pledge is now nowhere to be seen.

Instead, there is a bland and frankly unbelievable squaring-the-circle commitment to: “Build a consensus on modernising the Gender Recognition Act while upholding the Equality Act including the single sex exemptions it provides.”

This formulation gives Starmer and his aides carte blanche to declare absolutely anything they want as the new consensus. So in power he would be able to say trans self-ID is incompatible with protecting women’s single sex spaces or that it is wholly compatible - or support any fudge in between - depending on what is most politically convenient at the time.

https://twitter.com/tomhfh/status/1646399880363909121?s=20

So if you innately trust Starmer to make the right choice without having committed to either side of the debate in advance then you can vote Labour with confidence. That’s about 23 of you, I’d estimate. If you are one of the approximately 50 million British adults who don’t have blind faith in him, then you must accept that life under his rule will be just as Forrest Gump’s mother described it: Like a box of chocolates - you never know what you are going to get.

Harwood has also been briefed - by a disgruntled Labour staffer, I assume - that Labour chair Anneliese Dodds omitted the GRA reform pledge from a supportive social media post she sent out on Trans Visibility Day last month and that Starmer failed to put out any message at all on the day.

https://twitter.com/tomhfh/status/1646399876568162306?s=20

Well, what a flip-flopping fraud. The number of key issues Starmer has U-turned on now - in every case as a result of perceived electoral expediency rather than genuine intellectual inquiry - is frankly comical.

This readiness to switch position on important issues for purely tactical reasons will put some commentators in mind of the crafty Harold Wilson, who is surpassed only by Tony Blair in terms of electoral success for Labour. But I think a different comparison is more apt.