Labour losing women

Dawn Butler beclowns herself

On Tuesday Labour MP, Dawn Butler, set up a Twitter poll asking who people would trust more; Liz Truss, the Minister for Women and Equalities, or Stonewall.

This was presumably in response to recent news that Liz Truss is urging government departments to leave Stonewall’s diversity champions scheme.

At first the poll went the way Butler clearly hoped and expected.

But then, very quickly, it didn’t.

Just before 7.30pm, when almost 50 thousand votes had been cast and Truss was well into the lead, Butler quote-tweeted her own poll. She commented that “someone’s working hard” to promote the poll and encouraged people to ‘keep it going” despite the fact that the results were exactly the opposite to what she expected.

At the time of writing this - 1am on Wednesday 2nd June - with 74,333 votes cast, Liz Truss is still leading by a considerable margin.

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Obviously, this is just a Twitter poll, and therefore largely meaningless, but results aside, why is Dawn Butler, the MP for Brent Central, fighting the corner of an organisation that is misinforming its members on matters of law?

Last year the University of Essex ‘disinvited’ two feminist speakers, Professors Jo Phoenix and Rosa Freeman, amid allegations allegations of ‘transphobia’ and ‘hate speech’. A few weeks ago, the university publicly apologised to both women and released the independent review on their cancellation.

This report was scathing about the university’s relationship with Stonewall. It pointed out examples of policy documents which, under Stonewall’s influence, misrepresent the Equality Act 2010 and hate crime legislation.

“The policy states the law as Stonewall would prefer it to be, rather than the law as it is.

If the University considers it appropriate to continue its relationship with Stonewall, it should devise a strategy for countering the drawbacks and potential illegalities"

Dawn Butler is a member of parliament, elected and paid to create and uphold UK law. Instead of setting up puerile ballots on social media to score cheap political points, she should be seriously concerned that an organisation which is in receipt of substantial public funding is deliberately misrepresenting the Equality Act 2010 to the considerable detriment of women.

But then she is so determined to curry favour with trans activists that she went on national television and stated that a child is born without a sex.

Ben @Jamin2g

Dawn Butler: “A child is born without sex.”

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Gender identity ideology has been a disaster for the Labour Party. Smart, informed, capable women, historically some of the most passionate activists for Labour—women like Helen Steel, Linda Bellos and Julie Bindel—have been alienated and insulted by Labour’s disgraceful abandonment of feminist principles. Taking up space instead are pronoun-zombies like Butler and Lisa Nandy, who has to spend the rest of her life hoping the Tories will be nice enough never to share this footage during an election.

Rosie Duffield seems one of the few speaking up for women and she faces a constant barrage of abuse for it, often from those within the party. Her leader’s silence on the matter is deafening.

Kate @campervanwoman

Solidarity with @RosieDuffield1, once again being attacked and once again receiving no support from the leadership of her party. Thank you Rosie for supporting women and girls.

In September 2019, feminist campaign group, Woman's Place UK, hosted a meeting in Brighton to coincide with the Labour Party Conference being held there.

This meeting was disrupted by a mob of Labour Party members which gathered outside the venue. The protesters, some of them masked, intimidated attendees by crowding them, shouting at them and, in some cases, hurling projectiles. They then hammered on the windows and yelled abuse for the duration of the event.

Dr. Jane Clare Jones @janeclarejones

TRAs banging on the window of the #WPUK meeting in Brighton right now. Women meet. Trans activists aggressively try and hammer down the boundary. How fucking apt.

Listen to this young Muslim woman bravely making a speech while thugs do their best to intimidate her both her and the audience.

Imagine if you went back—not even too far, let’s say ten years—and told someone that that it wasn’t the National Front trying to drown out this woman’s voice, but Labour Party members attending its national conference.

The day after the WPUK meeting, Tom Barringer of Tottenham CLP strode onto the podium at the Labour conference not, as one might hope, to decry the thuggish tactics, but to condemn the meeting. He called WPUK a ‘transphobic hate group’ and shouted “shame on you!” to those who attended. His words garnered an enthusiastic round of applause from the audience.

As with antisemitism, the party needs to get serious about rooting out this kind of violent misogyny from this kind of man. In the meantime, they are driving women away, the sort of dedicated and talented women on whose support and hard graft the party has always relied.

Males appear on women-only party shortlists, they take up places on party schemes intended solely for women and are even elected to women’s officer roles. Most disgracefully, ‘Heather’ Peto took up a place on the Jo Cox Women In Leadership Campaign, and used his position to attack Rosie Duffield. Any attempt by women to challenge this abuse is shouted down, often with insults and intimidation.

If Starmer and his party are not prepared to stand up for women, for enlightenment principles, for freedom of speech, but most of all for reality, then it doesn’t take a political genius to know how the next election will play out. Labour needs smart women…for the party’s own good and for the intellectual health of the country.

So instead of mocking Liz Truss, Labour needs to understand the nature of Stonewall’s fraud, and how that fraud is wreaking havoc through almost every institution in the UK. Liz Truss grasps this complicated issue perfectly. Dawn Butler doesn’t even know when a Twitter poll isn’t going her way.