Why Labour’s ‘girl bosses’ are as big a problem as their ‘boys' club’
Progress on women’s rights will not be made by appointing another Oxbridge graduate with a shiny bob and the air of a head girl as First Secretary for women
Does Keir Starmer’s Labour government have a woman problem? The headlines this week suggest it does, yet the evidence doesn’t quite stack up.
The three great offices of state – Chancellor of the Exchequer, Foreign Secretary, and Home Secretary – are all held by women. Nearly half (46 per cent) of the parliamentary Labour party is female, and the Prime Minister is set to appoint a woman, Antonia Romeo, as Cabinet Secretary and head of the civil service.
Starmer’s pair of acting chiefs of staff are women, there is a record number of women ministers, and arguably the most powerful of his political opponents, tipped to be Labour’s next leader and our Prime Minister when, not if, Starmer falls is Angela Rayner.
Structural misogyny
Yet, in the week that saw Anas Sarwar, leader of Scottish Labour and man who would be First Minister, call for Starmer’s resignation and as the Peter Mandelson/Jeffrey Epstein scandal seeps into every orifice of the party, the Prime Minister had to pacify the women’s parliamentary Labour party, angry at the “boys’ club” culture that dominated Number 10 and beyond.
A chastened Prime Minister told a meeting of angry women MPs on Wednesday that he wants to “root out” structural misogyny. But before Starmer rushes to appoint a First Secretary to look at misogyny across government, as proposed by Harriet Harman, he needs to properly understand the problem.
Labour’s issue with women is as much the fault of the veteran Harman – appointed as the country’s first Minister for Women back in May 1997 – and her mini-mes, including Chancellor Rachel Reeves and the current women’s minister, Bridget Phillipson, as it’s the responsibility of the lads in Downing Street and party HQ.
Reeves and Phillipson, with their shiny bobs and carefully pressed trouser suits, represent the ‘girl boss’ strand of feminism. Harman personifies it. Their goal, it seems, is not to dismantle the economic, social and cultural structures that shore up misogyny and entrench patriarchal attitudes.
Instead, they want to “empower” women to take control of their lives, and in particular their careers. It is a personal rather than a collective approach to women’s rights. And for many Labour women, it has proved spectacularly successful.
Labour’s challenge is not with satisfying the ambitions of female Oxbridge graduates or North London matriarchs. The party struggles with women because the men – and women – at the top of the party seem to have a problem understanding the reality of most women’s lives.
The gender identity myth
Indeed, until recently the Prime Minister seemed to have a problem understanding what exactly is a woman. Only three years ago, he was arguing that a woman can have a penis. Former Labour MP Rosie Duffield was hounded out of the party for having the temerity to insist that sex is based on biology, not the gender identity myth.
And as a senior Labour source told the Spectator magazine this week, prior to the 2024 election, the party spent “more time working out whether chicks could have d**** than on a programme for government”.
Starmer’s Labour party certainly didn’t spend much time working out how to improve the lives of women living in Stranraer or Shipley. Labour candidates were keen to be photographed with Waspi campaigners prior to the election, only to abandon their cause when in power.
Grooming gang inquiry
It took the threat of a backbench rebellion to overturn the two-child benefit cap. And Labour’s reluctance first to accept the terrible reality of grooming gangs, and then to hold a public inquiry, exposed Labour and its leader as lacking empathy.
Only a year ago, Starmer accused Tory leader Kemi Badenoch of "jumping on a bandwagon" and "amplifying" the demands of the far-right for demanding an inquiry. Quite what is far-right about protecting vulnerable girls from being gang-raped by co-ordinated networks of men is beyond most women.
No doubt the Prime Minister is pondering the pros and cons of Harman’s suggestion of a First Secretary to tackle misogyny. He may well see the post as a way of out-sourcing his party’s 'women problem’ to a woman, while he gets on with running the country.
But it would be nothing more than a token gesture. A job for the girls. Something to keep the women knocking at the door of Number 10 at bay.
In June 2024, when Starmer was forced to respond to author and women’s rights campaigner JK Rowling’s accusation that Labour was “… dismissive and often offensive towards women fighting to retain their rights”, he rushed to defend his party’s record.
He said: “… I would point out the long record that Labour has in government of passing really important legislation which has advanced the rights of women and made a material difference... That fight is never over. Those challenges are never over. We need to make further progress when it comes to women’s rights…”
Publish guidance on single-sex spaces
Progress is not another Oxbridge graduate with a shiny bob and the air of a head girl as First Secretary for women. He should start by enforcing the law on women’s rights, as confirmed in the Supreme Court ruling won by For Women Scotland nearly a year ago.
Women’s minister (in name only) Bridget Phillipson has been sitting on the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s updated guidance on single-sex spaces and the Equality Act for 163 days. No one but Phillipson knows why.
If Starmer is serious about rooting out structural misogyny, he must pick up the phone to her this weekend and instruct her to lay the guidance before parliament as soon as recess is over.
His government’s continued failure to recognise women as a sex class and enforce women’s existing legal rights says far more about him and his attitude to women than his eagerness to please the girl bosses at the top of his party. Deeds not warm words, Prime Minister. Deeds.
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