On Israel and women’s rights, Keir Starmer faces pressure from his left.
On Israel and women’s rights, Keir Starmer faces pressure from his left.
B ritain’s general election is scheduled for July 4 and, with the incumbent Conservatives trailing Labour in the polls, the next prime minister will likely be Keir Starmer, the Labour Party leader.
Starmer styles himself as a moderate who is “bringing the country together.” Steering clear of controversy may be a sensible election strategy. But in Britain’s first-past-the-post system, the Labour Party may fail to win a decisive majority. Such a scenario increases the importance of electing Labour MPs who are amenable to compromise.
That’s why Starmer is focused on selecting “the highest-quality candidates” and — some have claimed — purging the party’s most left-wing MPs.
Israel–Hamas War
This isn’t Starmer’s first purge. Under Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour Party’s antisemitism problem got out of control. Starmer ousted Corbyn and his supporters and gestured support to British Jews. (In the upcoming election, Corbyn will be standing as an independent for his North Islington seat.)
But the Israel–Hamas war has resurfaced the problem. As early as November, just one month after the atrocities of October 7, Starmer struggled to keep his front-benchers in check. He ordered Labour MPs to abstain on a parliamentary motion calling for a cease-fire. But 56 MPs disobeyed him, including ten of his top team whom Starmer was forced to sack.
Now George Galloway, booted out of the Labour Party in 2003, is competing for left-wing voters disillusioned by Starmer’s relative moderation on Israel. Through his Workers Party, Galloway’s aim is to be an agent of chaos or, in his own words, “to bring about a hung parliament in which a negotiated program comes about.” Galloway, who has compared Israel’s defensive war against Hamas to the Holocaust, has refused to say whether he believes Israel has a right to exist. The deputy leader of the Workers Party, Chris Williamson, was suspended from the Labour Party in 2019 for antisemitism.
According to LabourList, which monitors the party’s strategy, “more than a dozen Labour-held seats with a significant number of Muslim voters have been described by the party’s website as ‘battleground areas.’”
Flip-Flop on Trans
The transgender issue is another problem haunting Starmer. On Good Morning Britain a month ago, presenter Richard Madeley grilled Starmer on his record on transgenderism. Madeley noted that in 2021, Starmer rebuked Labour MP Rosie Duffield for saying that only women have cervices; in 2022, when asked to define a woman in an interview, Starmer said both that “a woman is a female adult” and that “trans women are women.” Later, Starmer refused to answer the question whether a woman can have a penis. Finally, in 2023, he said that 99 percent of women don’t have penises.
“Where do you stand on transgender and transgender rights?” Madeley asked in the recent interview. “I start with biology,” Starmer said, while muttering an objection to being asked such a question on a breakfast show. “Obviously there’s a distinction between sex and gender, and the Labour Party has championed women’s rights for a very, very long time.”
Susanna Reid, Good Morning Britain’s female presenter, then asked whether Starmer would apologize to Duffield for saying she was wrong to state that only women have cervices. Starmer dodged the question, though eventually admitted that perhaps Duffield had been “right.”
Starmer learned the lesson from the left-wing former leader of Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon, that gender self-identification — a policy priority of transgender activists that would allow people to change their legal gender by self-declaration alone — is massively unpopular with the public. After gender self-ID blew up in Sturgeon’s face, accelerating her downfall, Starmer quietly walked back the Labour Party’s position on the issue.
Assuming a Labour victory, Starmer will soon have to decide what to do about the trans activists’ demands. The (likely outgoing) Conservative government issued an emergency outright ban of puberty blockers, which will expire September 3, after which it will be up to Labour to renew it or not. Labour has vowed to move ahead with a “conversion therapy” ban that will outlaw talk therapies based on the reality of sex for minors with gender dysphoria.
A Labour Party insider and women’s-rights activist who opposes the conversion-therapy ban told National Review that, “to the general public, a ban on conversion therapy sounds reasonable,” as the idea of “conversion” conjures images of physical, emotional, and even sexual abuse. Yet there is no evidence such practices are happening in the U.K. Really, what such legislation will do, said the activist, “is ban anyone whether it’s a parent, doctor, teacher, therapist from what they describe as having a pre-determined outcome, so if a child or a vulnerable adult says that they’re trans, then with this legislation that has to be the starting point.”
The U.K. is sometimes nicknamed “TERF Island,” referring to the stronghold of women’s-rights activists who have successfully fended off the transgender-policy agenda. The effectiveness of the TERFs lies in their willingness to work across partisan divides to secure sex-based rights and protections.
In recent years and under Conservative Party rule, women’s-rights activists have persuaded the Tory leadership to defend their rights across different sectors. They have benefitted from the support of high-ranking Conservative politicians such as Kemi Badenoch and Suella Braverman. Persuading the Labour Party will be more challenging since, at present, those in the party with trans-skeptical views have been ostracized, as happened to Duffield.
On Israel, either way, the U.K. government has limited influence on actual policy in the Middle East. But for British Jews, a very small minority of the population, there is reason to be fearful that a Labour government will kowtow to the demands of its anti-Israel majorities. This is especially true given the recent outbursts of antisemitism in anti-Israel protests and the failure of the British police to protect the rights of Jewish citizens. The posture the new leader takes will set the tone not just for the party but the country.
Say what you will about the Tories, but they have, thus far, provided at least something of a safeguard against some of the worst excesses of the Left. On both Israel and women’s rights, the floodgates may be about to open.