Composite Motion 10
What did Scottish Labour vote against?
And Scottish Labour voted NO on that.
It’s very embittering, this kind of thing. I thought the Left had finally caught on, half a century ago, that women are people too, that women matter too, that it’s not cute or funny or inevitable that men treat women as brainless inferiors. I thought that lesson had been learned. Yet here we are again, as if all that had been so much hot air.
It would be instructive to ask (demand?) of those who voted this down which parts they opposed and why. Let them stand up and take responsibility for their decision and present arguments as to why they believe their choice was correct. Isn’t that the basis of democratic debate? Isn’t this something that Scottish Labour values? Otherwise, what distinguishes this group of men from any other autocracy or dictatorship? “Because I say so,” isn’t really acceptable anymore, so why do they expect women to accept it now?
As an expansion of my comment above, those who voted against Composite Motion 10 must be in favour of one or more of the following:
1) Continued inequality of men and women.
2) Continued denial of women’s rights.
3) Removal of the protections aforded by the Equality Act 2010.
4) Denial of women’s sex based rights and single sex spaces.
5) Continuation of violence, exloitation and discrimination of women and girls.
6) Continued material disadvantage of women and girls compared to men.
7) Continued exploitation of women girls through pornography and prostitution.
8) Blocking positive debate on the issues.
9) Denying the primacy of the Equality Act 2010 in Labour policy development.
10) Taking no steps to end inequality and protect women and girls from violence, discrimination, and exploitation.
So which is it boys? Which of these things were you voting for when you voted down Composite Motion 10? Would you have been so quick to raise your hands in favour of these on a point-by-point basis? If not, why not? What’s the difference between that and voting down that Motion? Surely you can justify your support for point or points I’ve outlined above? It can’t be the case that you’re afraid of being held to account for your defeating a motion passed at the constituency level, can it?
If trans “rights” have anything to do with this defeat, it’s interesting to note that “trans” or “gender” appear nowhere in the Motion. The Motion can only conflict with trans “rights” if those “rights” interfere with the rights of women and girls. Voting against the Motion in faux-progressive support of trans “rights” still means voting for one or several of the ten points I’ve enumerated above. I’m guessing that opposition to the Motion rationalized around that excuse would be couched in terms of “transphobic dogwhistles” in the Motion itself. If so, then they should spell it out and suggest alternatives, otherwise they come across like a bunch of regressive misogynist goons. Is that the look they were going for? If so, then congratulations to them, they succeeded.
Though I am no longer, I was for a great part of my life a member of the Australian Labor Party, the policies of which at both state and federal levels, were determined by a hierarchy of conferences and councils, including special women-only conferences at state level for policy initiatives pertaining especially to women.
‘Gender diversity’ is a presently fashionable term that can be used to include transwhatevers as ‘women,’ but I think that in this context it means biological male as distinct from biological female. That having been said, it is nonetheless true that politicians as a whole career self-select from the pushiest part of the overall population.
https://www.parliament.act.gov.au/files/publications/articles-and-papers/you-cant-be-what-you-cant-see-women-in-the-legislative-assembly-for-the-australian-capital-territory#:~:text=The%20Australian%20Labor%20Party%20(ALP,the%202016%20election%20are%20women.
Over the weekend I listened to RNZ’s Saturday Morning show. It has a new presenter (I really miss Kim Hill). A political commentator and feature writer for several mostly left leaning and progressive publications was being interviewed about Judith Butler and what all the fuss is about. It was a tragically shallow discussion, and one that sounded like he’d spent a few hours of googling “no one has been able to refute Butler” “terms, some say it’s derogatory term, but I don’t know what else you’d call them”. You get the picture.
The single most interesting thing was he talked about attending a community meeting up in Auckland during our elections last year. This event has a long history of being light-hearted and safe, for lack of a better description. Someone asked the candidates if they would (and how), defend single sex spaces and sports. He said hell broke loose with people jumping up and shouting at each other. One candidate – from a. conservative and nationalistic party – said they would. The centre-right and libertarian candidates must have dodged and obfuscated because he didn’t mention them. But, the leftist candidates he said, basically said ‘you can’t even ask that question.’ That’s where left wing politics is. You can’t even talk about defending women’s sex based rights.