Something many thought impossible may finally be happening: the political dominance of progressives is coming to an end in Britain. The Labour Party may be in power, but the woke Left is losing control. This is good news for women and for politics more generally, and will allow saner Left-wing voices to prevail. Conservatives remain stuck with a Labour government, but woke cultural warriors will no longer shape and lead the political agenda in the way that they have.
True, some activists are still in denial. They are determined to pretend that nothing has changed, despite last week’s landmark Supreme Court ruling that trans women are not legally women under the stipulations of the Equality Act. The director of the London Marathon is insisting that trans women should be allowed to enter this weekend’s event as females. Some NHS managers have intimated their willingness to defy the judgment. Various institutions will try to misconstrue the law by, for example, wrongly insisting that transgender access to single-sex spaces must be decided on a case-by-case basis.
Despite such defiance, the fact remains that everything has changed. Stonewall’s response is Exhibit A.
The Supreme Court decision delivered a severe blow to the organisation. Its near-total silence in the days since speaks volumes. Having grown to be as powerful as any union and intricately linked to the Labour Party, Stonewall is politically astute. The movement which contributed so much towards gay equality in years past seems to have grasped that its recent trans activism, which included suggesting that nurseries were not doing enough to help children as young as two “recognise their trans identity, was a terrible mistake.
To restore its former status as a champion of the gay rights movement, Stonewall will have to radically change. There are signs this is already under way. In February, for example, it watered down its definition of transphobia.
Exhibit B is the beginning of the end of woke capitalism. The progressive Left’s march through the corporations appears to be grinding to a halt, aided perhaps by Donald Trump’s war on DEI in the US. The spread of identity politics activism throughout the workforce has been facilitated by militant HR departments and the weak-willed corporate leaders who defer to them. But employment lawyer Peter Daly assures me these trends will now be subject to scrutiny.
“This is a major blow for the HR industry,” he says. “Executives need to reckon with the fact that they have been pushing out unlawful processes and procedures. Companies are going to have to ask themselves why they have been competing with each other to misapply the law for the sake of a high ranking on the Stonewall Workplace Index.”
The end of the progressive epoch is relieving news for women. Granting transgender women the right to access female spaces has always clashed with the rights of women to preserve single-sex spaces for their privacy, safety and dignity.
Full recognition of transgender women has always necessitated the erasure of the female sex. The two are mutually exclusive, however much the extremists pretended otherwise with their denial of women’s rights and biological uniqueness, and repetition of the mantra that “trans rights are human rights”. It was a small group of gender-critical, Left-leaning campaigners who destroyed this dangerous illusion. I have been humbled to meet many of those women who have suffered dreadfully for the cause, from literary agents purged from their industry for being “dangerous and undesirable” to civil servants managed out for raising the alarm about identity politics’ infiltration into the supposedly neutral public sector. The transgender movement may have had noble aims but the damage it has caused to other, rights-based movements is hard to overstate.
By boldly asserting that trans individuals should change legal sex with no conditions attached, or that biological males should be permitted to compete in female sporting competitions, they made a mockery of the universal rights they claim to champion. They also demolished the shared trust and empathy that must exist between citizens, vulnerable or not, in any healthy society.
The trans lobby abused public sympathy by making increasingly unrealistic demands. The absurdity of the past few years has fostered mass discontent with the entire concept of minority rights; many now see rights-based politics as shrill, delusional, manipulative, narcissistic and trivial, rather than an important element of our liberal democratic system. This is a great tragedy.
What has now changed is that the dogmas which underpin woke identity politics are no longer tenable. The idea that there is no factual truth, only “lived experience”, has been exposed as at odds with objective reality, sanctified by law.
But there is another reason why the tyranny of progressivism may soon come to an end: there is now a cohesive rival ready to take over. The Blue Labour faction on the Right of the party is determined to lead a Left-wing “return to the real”. It wants to rebuild the UK’s hollowed-out industry, re-establish Labour as the party of work (rather than welfare), and forge a new covenant between the remote political class and the alienated people.
Those who are not natural Labour voters might be tempted to dismiss their efforts as wishful thinking. By their own admission, they have their work cut out.
As one Blue Labour MP told me: “There’s still too much party sympathy towards identity politics. But then again, there are a lot of MPs who are very new and want to be loyal to Starmer.”
There’s something about Blue Labour that feels of the moment; and there is something about the identity politics brigade that feels passé.
In the 21st century, people are craving a more grounded, reasoned political discourse. And if there is a rising sense of urgency that the West needs “to wake up”, it is not to the injustices that allegedly corrode its conscience but to the geopolitical and economic catastrophes that imperil its very existence.
In recent years, the politics of identity and grievance seemed to have become unstoppable. How ever hard some of us argued against it, and how ever often its claims were proven to be hollow, this juggernaut carried on regardless. But with last week’s judgment all that might have changed. Now it’s no longer outlandish to suspect that “woke” politics may soon be a distant nightmare.
