Here's a first: a union protest I don't support

When it comes to gender ideology, some within the labour movement are stuck in 2016

You probably won’t agree with all of Mr Embery’s policy prescriptions, but he will force you to think outside your usual political grooves — Wall Street Journal

Photo: flickr / keir.starmer.mp

IN an unprecedented move, four trade unions have decided to boycott this year’s Labour party women’s conference, scheduled to take place in September. Their reason? The party has ruled that men may not take part in the proceedings.

That really is the long and short of it.

True enough, some men had expressed a desire to attend on the grounds that they identified as women. But the supreme court dealt with such scenarios when it ruled last year – entirely sensibly – that individuals are defined by their biological sex for the purposes of equality law.

That means that if an organisation holds a single-sex conference then – shock, horror! - it should not allow some delegate spaces to be filled by members of the opposite sex.

The Labour party is, at long last, beginning to adopt some common sense positions on the issue of transgenderism. It is just a shame that it took several years and a judgment from the highest court in the land for it to reach this point.

For a long time, the party was in the grip of the radical trans movement and preached its gospel with an evangelical fervour. Keir Starmer memorably argued that it was ‘not right’ to say only women had a cervix, and former frontbencher Dawn Butler went on national television and claimed that babies were not born with a biological sex.

Labour MPs got themselves into all sorts of tangles when asked to define the word ‘woman’, and some even supported demands for men to be granted access to women’s single-sex spaces and sporting competitions.

In 2019, I represented my union at a Labour regional conference. A speaker came to the rostrum and demanded that the chair of the conference refrain from using he/she pronouns when addressing delegates. The speaker promptly received an enthusiastic round of applause. It was a sign of how far down the rabbit hole the party had travelled, and I pondered how such antics might be perceived by ordinary people whose votes we were chasing.

Those inside the party’s ranks – such as the MP Rosie Duffield and a small band of grassroots members and trade union activists – who were brave enough to push back against this unscientific and dangerous dogma were attacked and ostracised. But they stood firm, made their case calmly and thoughtfully, and eventually forced a shift in the public debate.

As the tide began to turn, individuals who had previously kept their heads down for the sake of a quiet life were suddenly willing to speak up. Some even scored victories in employment tribunals and the courts after being subjected to discrimination for their views. Gender ideology, with all its harmful consequences, was being exposed for what it was, and those who peddled it – across our political, educational and corporate institutions – were on the defensive. Logic and reason were, at long last, breaking out.

The debate is now going only one way. Though the battle is far from over, women are, slowly but surely, reasserting their hard-won sex-based rights and defanging the trans militants. I am convinced that in a few years’ time we will look back on the past decade as an aberration – a period when the progressive elites took leave of their senses and tried to impose on society an ideological snake oil which had little support among the masses and subordinated objective truth to subjective feelings.

That’s why the boycott of the women’s conference by four unions – Unison, Usdaw, Aslef and the Musicians’ Union – couldn’t be more ill-judged or ill-timed. These unions are angry that an event organised exclusively for the female class will not be open to members of the male class. Well, as a longtime trade unionist, my advice to them is: suck it up, comrades. This isn’t 2016 anymore; it’s 2026, and the debate has moved on.

Moreover, who are these unions actually speaking for? While their leaderships and activist bases may be in thrall to transmania, their rank and file members will often have little sympathy for the cause. Many of these members will be women. How can it be right that these women are denied the opportunity to influence a conference held by the party running the country, and at which matters affecting them in their daily lives will be debated, just because their union’s senior representatives are peeved that their personal fringe ideology isn’t being accommodated?

Unison in particular should reflect on its decision not to attend. The union was rightly castigated over its lack of support for the Darlington nurses, who, after being forced to share a changing room with a trans-identifying male colleague, secured an employment tribunal victory against their employer.

But I’m sure none of the four unions will abandon the boycott. That’s because many of their leading officials are now fully signed-up members of the progressive lanyard class, obsessed with promoting ‘diversity, equality and inclusion’ at every turn and regardless of any impact on their memberships or the divisions that their chosen doctrine has created within wider society.

It is because of the embrace of such fringe and unrepresentative dogma that unions are becoming increasingly irrelevant in the workplace. And that in itself is a tragedy, for as the economy continues to flatline and employment remains, for millions, insecure and unrewarding, they are needed as much as ever.

By their petulant actions, these four unions are doing their female members, and workers in general, a grave disservice.

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An edited version of the above piece first appeared on the GB News website.