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September 29, 2024 - 8:00am
The late Labour statesman Tony Benn divided politicians into Signposts and Weathercocks. He noted that the former “show the way” no matter how unpopular their stance, whereas the latter “hasn’t got an opinion until they’ve looked at the polls, talked to the focus groups, discussed it with the spin doctors.”
Yesterday, the Labour Party lost a Signpost. After years of being slighted, sidelined and slurred, Rosie Duffield MP ended her decades-long membership of the party and is now an independent. In a scorching resignation letter, the Canterbury MP blasted Keir Starmer for “sleaze, nepotism and apparent avarice”. “How dare you take our longed-for victory, the electorate’s sacred and precious trust, and throw it back in their faces,” she railed.
Duffield no doubt feels a tremendous sense of relief in having put clear green carpet between herself and the freebie-seeking fashionistas on the front benches. By daring to be a Signpost, by standing-up for women’s rights in the face of fanatical trans activists, she has been monstered by those who should’ve been on her side. Not only has the Prime Minister cold-shouldered Duffield, despite her winning what was once a Tory safe seat, but she has faced such grotesque threats that she has had to pay for her own security.
Some former colleagues are crowing over Duffield’s departure. Within hours of her resignation, Nadia Whittome MP posted on X that Duffield had “made a political career out of dehumanising one of the most marginalised groups in society.”
What Duffield has suffered has, of course, happened to countless others who have had the courage to publicly say that people can’t change their sex. To question “trans inclusion” policies in the workplace or simply to request a medical professional of the same sex, is to risk one’s career and friendship circle. So, what might Duffield’s departure from the party of government mean for them? What, under the premiership of weathercock Starmer, will happen to the ordinary people who know that sex matters?
Starmer is still squeamish about the definition of “woman”. Pre-election pratfalls, such as when he conceded “99.9% of women don’t have a penis”, show a man who is apparently more terrified of trans activists than of ridicule from the wider electorate.
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SubscribeMoral courage in action.
Best wishes to Rosie Duffield as an Independent.
Worth emphasising that she has demonstrated moral courage over many years. If there was a sensible side to Labour, she represented it.
I fear that her departure will be greeted by a shrug by Labour HQ, maybe even relief.
The question for me is how can so much have gone wrong with Starmer so quickly and is there a way back from him? Even asking the question, less than three months from the election, is quite something. I remember a time eons ago when people were complaining about Johnson, but at the start of his short tenure, and for some time in fact, he could pretty much walk on water.
The Labour Party became a really nasty place with the purging of the left using anti-semitism as a cover and collateral damage done to many completely innocent members. But the victims of this McCarthyism, inspired by Starmer and his party apparatchiks, will come for him and one of them has just courageously done so.