Women continually suffer Labour pains

FOR years the Labour Party has claimed to be the party of women and women’s rights, but last week this pretence came to a crashing halt when outgoing Chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, Baroness Falkner, went on record to say Labour has “completely abandoned women’s rights”.

- Esther McVey

What took so long for the penny to drop? Leader Keir Starmer couldn’t even define what a woman was at the General Election, neither could his Labour female grandees Reeves, Rayner, Cooper or Phillipson. It was only Rosie Duffield, the then Labour MP for Canterbury, now an Independent, who could state the obvious — for which she was hounded out of the party — that a man cannot be a woman, and that biological sex matters.

Somewhat embarrassingly for Starmer, who never tires of reminding us of his legal background, the Supreme Court in April ruled that women and sex referred to biological and not acquired gender. And yet despite this ruling, Labour’s Equality Minister Bridget Phillipson is letting it gather dust on her desk rather than implement it.