Toxic Labour fails to understand real needs of the nation
THE LABOUR movement likes to regard itself as the vanguard of progressive politics. But it is an increasingly toxic, reactionary force, detached from mainstream British opinion and gripped by narrow dogma.
Sir Keir Starmer’s party blathers about tolerance and compassion but in my opinion is a cesspit of intolerance and cruelty. It trumpets its supposed commitment to women’s rights but is plagued by rampant misogyny. It continually denounces hate speech but is filled with vicious hatreds, just as its attachment to diversity does not extend to diversity of opinion.
Labour’s descent into McCarthyite oppression is exemplified by the appalling case of Rosie Duffield, the MP for Canterbury.
If the party had not lost its moral values, then Duffield would be one of its heroines. A dynamic, engaging campaigner, she took the previously rocksolid Conservative seat in the heart of Kent at the 2017 general election, then held on to it two years later despite a sharp national swing against Labour.
At Westminster, she has been a powerful voice for women, most notably when she spoke movingly and bravely in the Commons about her own experience of domestic abuse.
YET she is now the target of such vicious hostility from activists that she has decided to miss Labour conference because of fears for her own safety, after she challenged the transgender ideology by standing up for science and female autonomy.
She has been accused of socalled “transphobia” for daring to state the truth that “only women have a cervix”, while she has also been ferociously condemned for criticising the fashionable policy of gender self-identification, which she believes is “a passport for malebodied biological men to enter protected spaces for biological women”.
Most people would find her opinions moderate and rational. But that does not appear to be true of the madhouse that is the modern Labour party, which now slavishly appears to follow the woke agenda, as epitomised by the bizarre recent utterance from senior MP Dawn Butler that “a baby is born without sex”. Yet, in the face of this, it is Duffield who is treated as the dangerous heretic, becoming the target of witch-hunts and death threats. Indeed, the party’s Deputy Leader Angela Rayner sternly warned Duffield to “reflect on her views”. At the same time Rayner expressed “solidarity with my trans brothers and sisters”, adding that “your fight is our fight”.
There could be no greater indictment of Labour’s flight from decency than the attempt to hound Ms Duffield into the wilderness. The systematic intimidation of her is reminiscent of the disgraceful way that the centrist Jewish Labour MP Luciana Berger was bullied by anti-Semites during the toxic leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, even requiring security guards when she attended conference. Sir Keir Starmer was meant to end this poisonous culture, but, as Duffield’s experience shows, he has miserably failed to do so. Shamefully, he has not even spoken out in her defence.
Instead he decided to indulge in organisational tinkering. With a strange inversion of priorities, he seems to think that the great task facing Labour is to change its system for electing its leader. His mission is replace the current method of One Member One Vote with a tripartite electoral college, made up in three equal parts of MPs, the trade unions and the membership.
That was the structure before Ed Miliband’s misguided reforms in 2013, which opened the way for Corbyn’s disastrous reign. Sir Keir is probably right in wanting to revert to the previous system, but this is hardly the most pressing issue of the moment, given all the problems in Britain, from the energy price hike to soaring debt.
AT A TIME of turmoil, when leadership is badly needed, Sir Keir’s focus on Labour’s internal structures looks like the worst kind of navel-gazing. The move could be a recipe for civil war, given that the embittered Left will not accept the change without a fight. During Labour’s wilderness years in the 1980s, the party was despised by the public not just for its extremism but also for its inward-looking myopia, irrelevant to the real needs of the nation.
That is happening again. The Government’s continual mistakes are providing plenty of ammunition for the Opposition, but Labour is engaged in its own self-destructive internal battles. As a result the party has nothing coherent to say on the economy or energy or mass immigration or social care or crime.
After four successive election defeats, Labour look further from power than ever.
‘Labour denounces hate speech but is filled with vicious hatreds’