In an interview on LBC, Keir Starmer refused to say whether a woman can have a penis. On the brink of a global famine, a dangerously escalating proxy war between east and west, and an energy emergency, the leader of Her Majesty’s opposition is unable and unwilling to answer a basic question of biology in fear of exploding his own party. Labour is in the grip of trans activists (or at least Starmer seems to think so), which ought to disqualify any party from serious consideration.

This is not an abstract issue. It is fundamentally a question of whether women are entitled to female only spaces. It is a question of women’s safety, but also an indication that Labour has adopted the full construct of divisive identity politics. Left unchecked, it sees women having to share female only spaces with perverts. It’s predicated on the notion that wearing a dress and feeling like a woman is all it takes to be considered a woman.

We have a word for this. Sexism. Not one activist is able to describe what it means to feel like a woman without calling up on sexist stereotypes. That such misogyny finds its natural home in the Labour party comes as no surprise. Labour has as much of a problem with women as it does Jews.

Every cloud, though, has a silver lining. Women everywhere are waking up to the threat this ideology poses. They are now realising that the fight for women’s rights, even the basic right to protected private spaces for women, is never over. Feminism has been complacent but now women are back on the agenda.

For the establishment parties, though, this is only skin deep. We saw the candlelit vigils for Sarah Everard (a pretty white girl) but that doesn’t go as far as protecting the thousands of teenage girls exploited on our city streets. A decade on from the Rotherham scandal, crimes against girls are still not properly recorded and there’s no reason to believe the practice of grooming has been brought under control.

As with Black Lives Matter, the virtue signalling doesn’t translate into action. We supposedly care about black lives but still a dozen black teenagers bleed to death in the gutter every month. Sarah Everard gets her vigil, but the victims of “honour offences” (male violence against women) are largely ignored because it’s inconvenient to the “diversity makes us stronger” narrative. We’ve had endless commentary on Sarah Everard, but only a re-tread of a police press release regarding the apparent murder of Sarah Hussein, a young Muslim woman who was “found on fire” in Bury.

We would posit that our largely open borders contribute to this hostile environment for women. It may not be politically correct to say so, but south asian men come from remote places where rape culture is the norm. Places where women are property to be used, abused and disposed of how men see fit. Our view is that men who commit these atrocities against women should be on the first plane out of Britain, but even Somali gang rapists get a free pass from human rights lawyers.

To address these issues we have to be candid and admit that ethnicity and culture is a factor in the epidemic of sexual violence against women. You can’t even begin to fix a problem unless you are able to precisely diagnose it, but our establishment is squeamish about offending sensibilities. Tangentially, if we are serious about helping the most vulnerable refugees, we should seek to safeguard women and children from sexual violence, but instead the RNLI goes out fishing for Muslim men of fighting age. 

When it comes to it, liberal feminists have a blind spot for violence visited on ethnic minority women, choosing to ignore FGM, forced marriage and honour killings. Teenage girls of Rotherham and Rochdale are too poor to matter. Stella Creasy is supposedly the champion of feminism on the left, but she’s preoccupied with her childcare problems (despite taking home an £80k salary). Ultimately, Keir Starmer will throw women under the bus every single time. His party demands it of him. His process of decorbynisation has stalled.

As much as anything this speaks volumes about Labour’s priorities. Labour still fancies itself as the party of the workers, so one might expect that issues such as food prices and energy costs wold be their central preoccupation. As with Covid, Labour is not only content to go along with whatever the Tories propose, they want them to go harder and faster on their disastrous Net Zero agenda. Another agenda which will disproportionately harm the lives of women.

It would be easy to dismiss LBC’s goading of Starmer as culture war fluff, distracting us from more important issues but this above all tells us where the Labour Party is intellectually – and where its hypocrisies lie. Labour will go to bat for illegal immigrants and wealthy middle class activists, and will enable the greatest assault on women’s rights for a century. Labour has given up on the British people.