Keir Starmer is a hypocrite and a coward

The Scottish Government have been criticised in some quarters for "hiding behind the Supreme Court ruling" on gender ideology, but actually they have a fairly watertight excuse for behaving in the way that they are.  They have zero power to overturn or amend the Equality Act or to overrule the Supreme Court's interpretation of the Act, and their own self-ID legislation has been vetoed by London at the stroke of a pen, so it's perfectly reasonable for them to say that all they can do is operate within the very tight constraints that others have chosen for them.

But the situation is totally different for the UK Labour Government.  In fact it's the complete opposite.  As I understand it, the Supreme Court ruling had nothing whatever to do with the European Convention on Human Rights, or any other international treaty obligation, or any UK constitutional principle that is outwith the London government's control.  It was purely and simply the court's interpretation of the textual meaning of an ordinary piece of domestic legislation passed by Gordon Brown's majority Labour government in 2010.  Lord Hodge made clear that the ruling was based on a logical deduction of what the legislature (or to all intents and purposes the Labour majority within it) must have intended when it passed the law.  Effectively the court was explaining what the Labour Party's own definition of a woman is, or at least what it was fifteen years ago.

If the Labour party of today is unhappy with that definition, the Supreme Court ruling is not even a trivial obstacle for them in putting it right.  All they would have to do is use their current parliamentary majority to repeal or amend the Equality Act and legislate in crystal clear language for a new trans-inclusive definition of a woman.   If they did, For Women Scotland could go back to the Supreme Court but they would get completely the opposite result from before.  Exactly the same judges would say that equalities legislation gives trans women exactly the same rights as other women.  And that is not an exaggeration.  That is literally true, because the courts can only interpret laws in cases of ambiguity.  It is for MPs to decide what those laws say, and to remove all ambiguity if they so choose.

Now, I for one am glad that Labour are not going down that road.  I think the definition of a woman that has been arrived at is the sensible and correct one and it should be left alone.  But what I have no respect for is the Hollywood production Starmer has put on to try to convince everyone that he has no agency in this matter.  It's as if he's just been handed tablets of stone from Our Lord Jesus Christ and has a duty to obey The Truth, which is an absolute that no mere mortal can defy or resist.  That's a bit different from the reality, which is that he just doesn't much fancy amending a dodgily-drafted Gordon Brown / Harriet Harman law from a decade and a half ago.

The trans activists who Starmer led up the garden path have got every right to be furious with him, because he's simply too much of a moral coward to admit that he's changed his mind about the pro-trans comments he made a few years ago - or more likely that he never believed those comments in the first place, and only made them because he naively thought at the time they would prove to be net vote-winners.