Our rights are not yours to give away – Labour must listen to women: Dani Ahrens

Dani Ahrens is a founding member of Brighton Pride and a lifelong left wing activist. On 24th June she tweeted a thread  of paragraph by paragraph commentary on an article by Lloyd Russell-Moyle in Tribune. We have her permission to reproduce the thread here, with some additional background links.

I like Lloyd, but this article is a mess. Here’s a long and detailed thread explaining why, mostly in pictures. Really happy to meet in person to discuss it.

The first two paragraphs were so full of inaccuracies I had to annotate them twice. The Sunday Times article is here if you want to check what’s actually been reported.

Link to the government’s announcement in June 2018 that they did not intend to amend the Equality Act.

Here’s the link to the Populus opinion poll results. Credit to @helenstaniland for this useful data.

 

 

 

 

Lloyd repeatedly describes opponents of GRA reform as ‘social conservatives’ but all the actors he identifies are left wing feminists, apart from @DavidTCDavies. Women have forced this issue onto the agenda against formidable institutional resistance.

We are nobody’s puppets.

‘Just like Section 28’ klaxon! Here’s my response to Owen Jones saying that a year ago.

 

 

 

 

More details here about the problems with the Select Committee inquiry.

Bit of a sting in the tail here. Lloyd picks and chooses which bits of the Labour manifesto he wants to stick to. Rather than ensuring that the single-sex exemptions in the Equality Act are fully understood, he wants to get rid of them altogether (except for ‘medical reasons’):

I’m not a social conservative. Here’s what I said in the GRA consultation.