@Louise71James@LeeAndersonMP_@tessamunt My local mp @tessamunt authentic, effective and seriously hard working, present at what I feel is the most important ministers debate in recent times. Then you’ve got Lee 🤦♀️
@msm_monitor And stupidest tweet of the day goes to this….the reason Nicola Sturgeon is facing such scrutiny is because she was his boss…go on, look that up
@justmeinnit Very good, wear that I’m so kind badge loud and proud. Now take a nano second to think of women in other vulnerable spaces where they don’t have a choice like say rape clinics, homeless shelters, prison cells I could go on but honestly I now realise I just can’t be arsed
Duncan Bannatyne backing away from Andy Burnham tells you something important.
This is not some niche online row.
This is where Labour’s problem with normal voters becomes impossible to hide.
Burnham has spent years cultivating the image of a straight-talking, sensible, working-class Labour figure.
Less Westminster.
More real world.
A politician who “gets it”.
Then he backs self-ID and questions guidance protecting women’s toilets for biological women.
That is the dividing line.
Because for millions of people, this is not complicated.
Women’s toilets are for women.
Female-only spaces exist for a reason.
Privacy matters. Boundaries matter.
Biology matters.
Labour politicians keep pretending this is an obscure culture-war trap.
It isn’t.
It is a basic test of whether they can say something true when activists are watching.
Burnham failed that test.
And if he cannot defend women’s spaces without equivocation, why should anyone believe he has the courage to lead the country?
@TracyEdwardsMBE@CHANEL I’m so disappointed, Mademoiselle has been my scent forever, the optics of this is so jarring I just can’t wear it anymore. I guess they can aim for the 20 year old purse, at £80+ for a scent might be another Jaguar moment
They Still Don't Get It. And They Never Will.
The local election results are barely counted and the Labour messaging machine has already told you what to think. Chris Bryant says Labour must deliver the change the country desperately wants. Heidi Alexander says people voted for change in 2024 and want it delivered faster. David Lammy says the last thing Britain needs is Labour turning inward. They have misread the results so completely that the misreading itself is the story.
Sunderland fell to Reform after fifty years. Gateshead fell. Blackburn fell. Tameside fell after forty seven years. Wales, governed by Labour since devolution began in 1999, now has a Plaid Cymru administration for the first time. These communities and this nation did not vote the way they did because Labour was delivering its agenda too slowly. They rejected that agenda entirely. The small boats still coming. The dispersal of unvetted men into communities that were never consulted. The energy bills driven up by net zero dogma. The two-tier policing that jailed people for expressing views on immigration while sectarian marches went unchallenged. The grooming gang inquiry that victims say has been managed to minimise accountability rather than deliver it. The taxation of working people and family farms while billions flow in foreign aid to Afghanistan, Somalia and Sudan, regimes that stone women, ban girls from education and sentence apostates to death. The country that funds gender apartheid abroad while failing to protect its own women and girls at home has now delivered its verdict at the ballot box.
These are not policies the country wants faster. These are policies the country has rejected. The distinction is fundamental and Labour's entire leadership class has missed it. Starmer's response to the worst local election result in Labour's history is to bring back Gordon Brown and Harriet Harman.
Gordon Brown was Chancellor when he sold 395 tonnes of Britain's gold reserves between 1999 and 2002 at near a twenty year low, a decision that cost the Treasury an estimated £7 billion at subsequent prices. He became Prime Minister and presided over the worst financial crisis since the 1930s before losing the 2010 general election. He is now being brought back as Special Envoy on Global Finance to advise a government that has just suffered its worst ever local election defeat. Nigel Farage's assessment was characteristically blunt. An unpopular Prime Minister who lost a general election is now seen by Starmer as the saviour. He meant Labour are doomed.
Harriet Harman has been appointed adviser on violence against women and girls. Between 1978 and 1982 Harman served as legal officer of the National Council for Civil Liberties at a time when the Paedophile Information Exchange held affiliated status within the organisation. In 2014 Harman expressed regret after this connection was reported. She denied supporting PIE or campaigning to lower the age of consent below sixteen. Those denials are on the record. What is also on the record is that a Prime Minister whose government lost the local elections in part because of failures to protect vulnerable girls from organised sexual exploitation has chosen as his safeguarding adviser someone whose name has been permanently associated with that controversy. The optics alone represent a judgment so poor it defies explanation.
This is the reset. Two figures from Labour's past, one associated with one of the most costly financial decisions in modern British history, one with one of the most toxic controversies in the party's recent record, brought back the morning after the worst local election result in the party's history.
The ministers and the Prime Minister are operating in the same closed loop. Same assumptions. Same conclusions. More of the same, delivered faster, by older faces with worse records. The country was clear on Thursday. This government cannot hear it.
Yes, the people who call themselves 'trans' exist and they deserve exactly the same rights as everyone else, which, fortunately, they already have in the UK. It would rightly be considered discrimination if a person was refused employment, housing or the vote because they identified as trans.
'Trans women are women' is a thought-terminating cliché. Men are not women. That doesn't mean they're not allowed to present themselves however they like, call themselves whatever they like and believe whatever they like about themselves. It means they haven't changed sex.
If we replace the objective, observable characteristic of sex with the unfalsifiable concept of gender identify, women and girls lose, among other things, their right to fair and safe sport and women-only spaces, including changing rooms, prison cells and rape crisis services.
Women and girls are provably more vulnerable to forms of abuse including sexual assault, harassment and voyeurism in mixed-sex spaces. There is no evidence that trans-identified men don't have exactly the same rates of criminal offending as all other men.
Trans people exist. I have no desire for them not to exist; indeed, I wish them safety, happiness and health. However, 'existence' does not, and should not, mean the violation of other people's right to privacy, dignity and freedom of speech, or the reconfiguration of society to indulge a fallacy.