Labour is Still Letting The Far Right Set The Agenda

It’s one day to go until we see 14 years of Tory rule overturned. Which is why I don’t want to be a doom monger; I think living standards under Labour will incrementally improve for lots of people. But I am worried. Again and again, Labour’s top officials have ceded to far right talking points in their crusade to become ‘electable’. And as France’s example shows, a weak centrist leader who gives way to the far right doesn’t strengthen their own position: they only fertilise the ground for further extremist ascension.

In the dregs of the election campaign, somehow the national political conversation has once again shifted to talking about where people piss. This is almost solely thanks to the author JK Rowling, who has become intensely fixated on transgender people over the last five years, specifically trans women. I have to write very carefully when I’m talking about JK Rowling because she is extremely litigious and responds with great sensitivity to suggestions she has become ‘radicalised’ by the issue, even as she spends most of her waking hours lobbying influential people to stop trans women using the spaces the law says they can. 

And her campaign works; in an interview with the Times this week, Keir Starmer was posed a question posted originally on X/Twitter by Rowling, asking if trans women (note: she did not use this term) with gender recognition certificates (GRCs) could use women-only spaces. This is the whole purpose of a GRC. It officially recognises someone’s gender. The clue is in the name. And under the 2010 Equality Act, yes, people with GRCs can use spaces according to their legal gender. 

Yet that is not the answer Starmer, former human rights lawyer and the next UK prime minister, gave. 

“No. They don’t have that right,” he told the Times. “They shouldn’t. That’s why I’ve always said biological women’s spaces need to be protected.” 

He also expressed a desire to meet with Rowling. Why? Why does the bigoted obsession of a lone, very, very rich person who is loud online matter more as a policy issue to Starmer than actually adjusting the material conditions (housing, healthcare, employment rights) that would improve the lives of the marginalised group she continues to target? How can Rowling alone force the UK’s next PM into a verbal commitment to rolling back the human rights of an entire group of people, when he won’t make concrete pledges to fund public services to the tune that this needed? 

It has been a similar story on other issues that the press make a lot of sound and thunder about, but don’t impact the daily lives of people in the UK – at least not in the way they’re framed. Labour’s rhetoric on immigration, for example, with Starmer recently telling the Sun (a paper he’d previously claimed he wouldn’t entertain) that he’ll “make sure we[‘ve] got planes going off […] back to the countries where people came from.” 

Despite its massive predicted majority, the party is still in thrall to the far right’s agenda, rather than setting its own. Present-day Labour seems to combine the economic approach of the 2010 Tories with the talking points of 2024 Nigel Farage. Does that sound like a recipe for national renewal? Or one of delayed-onset disaster for progressive politics? I want to hope – but I fear we are being led into the darkness once more.