Woeful

This reasoned and analytical piece from Hannah Barnes the New Statesman on the Supreme Court's ruling on the meaning of sex under the Equality Act should make the hacks at the Guardian blush.

While they have focused on promoting victimhood to the point of scaremongering, Barnes not only takes a balanced approach, but shows that Starmer remains all at sea on the issue.

The response from Labour has been woeful. It took the Prime Minister six days to say he was “really pleased” with the “clarity” brought by the judgement. His spokesperson confirmed that Starmer no longer believed trans women were women. But the PM hasn’t condemned the threats made to women during the trans rights activist protests that followed the judgement, at which some carried placards bearing abusive messages, including “The only good Terf is a [dead] one” and “Bring back witch burning”.

She also skewers Labour for its attempts to rewrite history:

A Labour source told the Telegraph the judgement showed why it was “so important that Keir hauled the Labour Party back to the common-sense position the public take on these sorts of issues”. This was, the source said, “one of the reasons the country felt Labour was safe to elect”. Really? Wasn’t it Starmer who, in 2021, called the then Labour MP Rosie Duffield’s statement “only women have a cervix” “something that shouldn’t be said”.

Of course, the Labour source wasn't really a source, just someone given the privilege of anonymity to spin a self-serving line with a scripted quote or two. 

By contrast, George Eaton's "interview" with Steve Reed in the same publication is an example of a hack phoning it in. 

To call it a puff piece would be to overstate the amount of effort that went into it.

But it is full of free hits for Reed with the lines he wanted to get across and devoid of challenge from Eaton, who no doubt has a long career of access ahead of him, after being cleared by the paedophile Peter Wilby over a scandal that should have ended his career.