“The only thing consistent about Keir Starmer is the inconsistency.”
Good heavens. It’s happened again. Keir Starmer — our nation’s most determined weather vane — has changed his mind. Again. On a subject of such profound national importance as what constitutes a woman.
Now, this isn’t just another trivial U-turn over a budget pledge or some obscure policy hiccup. This is the foundational biological and legal definition of sex, clarified unanimously by the Supreme Court. And yet for the better part of five years, Labour’s leader has pirouetted around it like a philosophy undergrad afraid of offending the lecturer.
What we’re dealing with here is not a statesman, but a flip-flop machine, a man so lacking in conviction that his views seem downloaded daily from Twitter’s trending tab.
Back in 2018, as part of Jeremy Corbyn’s merry band, Starmer offered no resistance when Labour pledged to bring in self-ID for trans people. Corbyn’s position was clear: “Where you have self-identified as a woman, then you are treated as a woman.” Not a peep of protest from Starmer then.
Fast forward to 2020, newly minted as Labour leader, Starmer declared on Facebook:
“Trans rights are human rights, and your fight is our fight too. The Labour Party stands proudly with the trans community.”
All aboard the self-ID train. Full steam ahead.
When the going got tough…
In 2021, Rosie Duffield MP dared say only women have a cervix. A biological fact. Cue outrage — not just from activists, but from her own party. Starmer, asked about her remarks, replied with all the backbone of blancmange:
“It is something that shouldn’t be said. It’s not right.”
Not right? It’s GCSE biology.
Then came his infamous dodge on LBC in 2022, where he wouldn’t say whether a woman could have a penis. “I don’t think that discussing this issue in this way helps anyone,” he muttered, blinking like a man who’d misplaced both his moral compass and his spine.
And let’s not forget his masterclass in legal misdirection when he told The Times:
“A woman is a female adult, and in addition to that trans women are women… that is the law.”
To which J.K. Rowling, quite rightly, replied that Starmer was misrepresenting the law. The author — who has read more legal casework than most MPs, it seems — accused Labour of abandoning women’s rights.
At long last, a shift… sort of
By 2023, public patience had worn thin. The Isla Bryson scandal, where a convicted male rapist declared himself a woman and was placed in a women’s prison, horrified the country. Even then, Starmer’s statements barely moved the needle.
April 2023:
“99.9 per cent of women… haven’t got a penis.”
Well, that still leaves 35,000 British women who apparently do, according to Sir Keir. Or perhaps it’s just the rounding?
By July, he finally ruled out self-ID without a medical diagnosis, saying:
“Firstly, a woman is an adult female, so let’s clear that one up.”
How generous. How brave. How… wildly overdue.
Even Tony Blair managed more clarity:
“I think we can say [what a woman is] quite clearly. A woman is with a vagina and a man is with a penis.”
And what was Starmer’s response to that? “Tony’s right about that.”
So after years of flip-flopping, fudging and fumbling, the man who once said Duffield’s comments “shouldn’t be said” now concedes “biologically, she is right.”
Well, quite.
Politics without principle
Let’s be blunt: this isn’t “a journey” — it’s a PR operation. A calculated zigzag through focus groups, activists, Twitter mobs, and party factions. His views change faster than Elon Musk’s algorithms, and with about as much consistency as a vending machine in a blackout.
The Labour line now? A “common sense position”, we’re told. As if this is the result of great moral reflection, rather than public pressure, Supreme Court intervention, and the tireless work of women who were hounded for stating basic facts.
Badenoch — now Leader of the Conservatives — had the final word:
“The era of Keir Starmer telling us that some women have penises has come to an end. Hallelujah.”
Amen to that.
But let’s be clear: this wasn’t leadership. It was capitulation. And if you need a court ruling to finally say what your mother could’ve told you when you were five, you probably shouldn’t be running the country.
Starmer didn’t lead Labour to clarity. The electorate, women’s rights campaigners, and biology itself dragged him there.
And tomorrow? Who knows. Maybe he’ll be back at it again, holding up a rainbow flag and promising self-ID by lunchtime.
Because if there’s one constant with Flip-Flop Starmer, it’s that he’ll say whatever it takes to be popular — right up until it isn’t.
