A woman reclines on a deck chair under a clear blue sky. She’s on holiday, but her mind is back in London. “It’s a shit day,” she announces, her voice breaking, adding that the long-delayed EHRC guidance on single-sex spaces has just come into force. “All it does is dismiss the lived experience of trans people and protects nobody.”

The video is excruciating to watch, but it continues with an unwitting self-own: “We’re living through this moment in history when people will look back and realize how rubbish politicians were.”

Some of us already do. And Samantha Niblett, the vacationing Labour MP for South Derbyshire, is a prime example. She is one of 165 MPs from different parties who signed an Early Day Motion opposing the EHRC guidance, apparently failing to realize that it is based on the 2010 Equality Act. Niblett impugns the motives of feminists who take a different view, claiming they just “hate trans people.”

Andy Burnham is on holiday and may have better things to do than watch his MP’s cringe-worthy meltdown. But Niblett is a shameless publicity-seeker who has promised to bring sex toys into Parliament in the autumn (to promote sex education). She is one of the 2024 intake that arrived at Westminster parading their allegiance to the trans cause, no matter how much damage it does to women’s rights.

At a moment when the public has had enough of this nonsense, Labour MPs are doubling down. Even now, 16 months after the Supreme Court ruling, they shamelessly repeat the lie that the judges stripped trans people of rights they never actually had. No one ever had a legal right to use toilets and hospital wards in accordance with their “gender identity” rather than biological sex. But MPs like Niblett know that Burnham has their back.

You might think one of the first duties of the Prime Minister, who is also leader of the Labour party, is to maintain standards of decency and honesty in public life. When his MPs make false claims about the EHRC guidance, they do incalculable damage to political discourse. They poison a political atmosphere that’s already so rancid that certain pro-trans protesters wave placards calling for the assault and murder of gender-critical women.

Yet Burnham couldn’t bring himself to accept the Supreme Court ruling for more than a year, finally doing so only when it became an issue during the Makerfield by-election campaign earlier this summer. Even then, he appeared to be speaking through gritted teeth, talking about the need to implement the EHRC guidance in a way that “does not marginalize already marginalized communities.”

Trans activists are anything but marginalized, and they have a regrettably large cohort of supporters in the Parliamentary Labour Party. “I’m so ashamed, I’m so unbelievably ashamed,” Niblett declares in her video. Sadly, she’s not apologizing for making a public spectacle of herself, but for failing to make sure trans women are allowed to enter women-only spaces. “Stop pretending this is about protecting women’s rights; it’s nothing of the sort,” she cries.

Presumably, Niblett has constituents who aren’t trans and might find this rant by their elected representative a tad undignified. I don’t know what women in the current Cabinet make of it. But Barbara Castle and Shirley Williams must be turning in their graves.

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Joan Smith is a novelist and columnist. She was previously Chair of the Mayor of London’s Violence Against Women and Girls Board, and is on the advisory group for Sex Matters. Her book Unfortunately, She Was A Nymphomaniac: A New History of Rome’s Imperial Women was published in November 2024.

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