Ah. Talking Common Sense Does Not Go Down Well In The Labour Movement.

The cowardly enablers of thuggery. An MP is now too much at risk to attend her own party’s conference Melanie Phillips Sep 19 The Raft of the Medusa; Jean-Louis Théodore Gericault, 1818-19 The Labour MP Rosie Duffield has decided to stay away from this year’s Labour party conference after receiving advice that her safety there could be at risk.  The reason? She has been branded transphobic for “knowing that only women have a cervix”. She has also pointed out that it might not be appropriate for people with male bodies who identify as women to enter female-only spaces. The position in which she finds herself is clearly appalling. For a member of parliament to be advised not to attend her own party conference because her safety is threatened is a new low even by the standards of our culture of coerced conformity.  Indeed, the apolitical Speaker of the House of Commons, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, has felt moved to make an unprecedented intervention over her treatment  by observing that elected representatives should be able to appear publicly “without fear of harm”. You don’t say. Duffield’s experience shows once again how this gender lunacy is not just shutting down freely expressed views but is also posing a physical threat to those taking a contrary position — a position which also happens to state the biologically blindingly obvious.  As with other such issues, this shocking intimidation is being made possible by the cowardice of those in authority — in this case, the leadership of the Labour party, running terrified from the culture wars and, in particular, its own LGBT+ grouping. The Sunday Times (£)  reports:  “LGBT+ Labour now seem to hate my guts and I feared they’d have a massive go at me at conference,” Duffield said. “The people who threaten me I don’t think are actually likely to harm me. They just say it often and very loudly.” And what has been the reaction of her party leader, Sir Keir Starmer? The Sunday Times tells us that he   recently texted her to check on her welfare. Wow — cowering down so as not to be counted, or what?! The phrase “hanging out to dry” comes irresistibly to mind; or, as on the raft of the Medusa in the painting above, setting Duffield and similar inconvenient individuals adrift. The beleaguered MP is in this position because Starmer has failed to tackle the root issue: that certain transgender activists have set themselves against women’s interests and even identity by denying that men and women are biologically different, and trying to silence those who insist that a biological man who declares himself to be a woman remains inescapably a man. Terrified of upsetting one or other constituency, Starmer is trying to appease them both. Starmer is the man who tweeted a picture of himself and his deputy “taking the knee” in support of Black Lives Matter — and then tried to brush aside as irrelevant its anti-police agenda. Starmer is the man who tried to appease both sides in the great Brexit crisis by insisting that a “soft” Brexit, which would have kept the UK within the ambit of the EU's laws, nevertheless would enact the British people’s decision to leave the EU in the 2016 referendum. True, he was braver over the issue of antisemitism in the Labour party, passionately speaking out against it and taking action against certain key offenders. But these relatively tough measures were greatly eased by the fact that the antisemites in question were supporters of the hard-left Momentum faction around Jeremy Corbyn, and being seen to get rid of that indisputable electoral liability was a political no-brainer.  In order to deal appropriately with the threat to Rosie Duffield and others in his party under similar pressure, he should take the same kind of condign action against the LGBT+ people in his party as he did against the antisemites — first and foremost, by calling out these trans totalitarians for what they are. Continuing to fail to do so will make it clear to women that he has simply abandoned them — and will make it clear to everyone else that he has also abandoned in consequence rationality and decency. The transgender issue is ripping apart the whole of the left, between on the one hand those who want to prevent women from being erased altogether and replaced by “people who menstruate” and other lunacies, and on the other those who wish to stamp out anyone who resists this. There is a further point to be made. The Sunday Times reports: Duffield believes some of those who attack her for her views are “straight white men”. She said: “There are some women who get involved and want to be seen to be very woke ... but mostly it is men, and the same men that have trolled me ever since I got elected.  “So it looks like, feels like and smells like misogyny, and this is just the latest cause they have latched on to ... The fact that I am blonde — they call me a bimbo. The fact that I don’t like antisemitism. There is always something, but it is always the same people who attack me.” In 2018 Luciana Berger, then a Labour MP, was given police protection at the Labour party conference after months of receiving anti-Jewish abuse as a result of her attempts to rid the party of its erupting antisemitism. In Britain and America, Jewish students run a gauntlet of intimidation, incitement and threats on campus from anti-Zionists and others promoting the left’s “intersectionality” agenda. Jews elsewhere are being verbally abused and physically attacked, disproportionately so by black and Muslim individuals; as a result of the identity of those attackers, the left is shockingly silent about these attacks.  In America, Black Lives Matter and Antifa smash and loot shops and businesses and beat up white passers-by; the Democrats and much of the rest of the left noisily support Black Lives Matter and have adopted its anti-white demonisation and bigotry. On both sides of the Atlantic, academics with conservative views, or who support Israel, or who dissent from man-made global warming theory or any of the myriad “intersectionality” issues which form our contemporary sub-Marxist Salem, are subjected to abuse, professional isolation or physical threats from so-called “progressives”. The fact is that the left is being increasingly defined by thuggery — and those Democrat or Labour political leaders, university vice-chancellors, cultural elites or other self-styled “moderates” in positions of authority, who are either choosing to look the other way or are even actively cheering on the vicious inanities of identity politics, are thuggery’s enablers.  A straight line connects the 18th century French Revolutionary terror, 20th century communism and fascism and now the 21st century’s cultural totalitarianism.  Far from being the avatars of progress, decency and social or any other kind of justice, the left are their nemesis.