I’m old enough to remember when the Labour Party was just incompetent and not, as it is now, awful and stuffed to the gills with identitarian extremists of various shades. I can look back at times when the party might have been in internal turmoil, as it was under James Callaghan, Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock, but the party and its extremists never turned on and attacked women, women who merely speak up to protect their rights, like it has today.

I can’t for example imagine any of the leaders I’ve named above having to faff and equivocate, as Sir Keir Starmer did, when asked the question: ‘Do only women have a Cervix?’ I certainly can’t imagine that many if any of the old Labour types I grew up with would consider it remotely acceptable to do what Labour MP for Brighton Kemptown Lloyd Russell-Moyle did which was to cross the floor of the Commons chamber during a debate on the cult of trans, sat close to a female Tory MP with whom he had disagreed and tried to stare her out in a quite obviously intimidating way.

Now looking back at Lloyd Russell-Moyle’s record is instructive. He’s clearly a socialist nutter who goes apeshit over minor stuff such as giving parents control over school RSE lessons, but getting in the face of an opposing MP, an MP who is merely speaking up in favour of women’s rights, is nuttery too far.

Unfortunately Lloyd Russell-Moyle is not alone in his nuttery. I seems that the party that once produced some of the brightest and most influential female politicians that Britain has seen, people like Barbara Castle and Jennie Lee for example, is now longer a safe place for women and a party where women asking awkward questions about where our society is going are being increasingly told to ‘shut up’. The cult of trans has become so much of an influence in the Labour Party that those who oppose it and oppose it for good and sound reasons, are either silenced by internal party intimidation or fear of intimidation or who if they do speak up will find themselves getting monstered by party members and the supporters and acolytes of the cult of trans.

There is it seems no space in Labour for those women who wish to protect the hard won rights of British women. But there appears to be plenty of space and opportunity for those, like Lloyd Russell-Moyle and others, who wish to chant and repeat the empty platitudes and quasi-religious chants from their cult, such as ‘transwomen are women’.

If you want to get some idea of how bad things are for women in today’s Labour Party then you need look no further than to see how the Labour MP Rosie Duffield has been treated. Rosie Duffield is, on the face of it the perfect person to be a Labour MP. She’s from a working class background, is a single mother who has worked hard to support her child and who has to confront the spectre of domestic abuse. Rosie Duffield is a woman who entered Parliament in order to improve the lot of her class. Getting people like this into Parliament and having them fight for the working classes at Westminster is what the Labour Party was set up to do all those years ago. The problem, at least for the ocean of nutcases that now infest the Labour Party, is that Ms Duffield has for them one big flaw. That ‘flaw’ as they see it is that she speaks up for women and for women’s rights. She will not buy into the fiction that men can become women or vice versa. She will not speak the convenient lies demanded of her by the cult of trans.

Ms Duffield has written a brilliant piece describing what it is like to be the woman who will not deal in the lies that are required by the cultists. The piece, which is in Unherd magazine, shows a Labour Party that is not a safe or welcoming place for women who will not kow tow to the cult of trans or for women who wish to speak up for women’s rights. She tells of how Labour MP’s and the party establishment turned their backs to her and abandoned her when she pointed out that the trans emperor has no clothes by stating that only women can have a Cervix. She spoke of the lack of support that the party has given her even when she was receiving death threats from delusional and extremist trans activists.

Ms Duffield’s story of how she has been very poorly treated by Labour is already gaining a lot of traction but what caught my eye in her account of what it’s like to be a women critical of the gender cult in Labour are these two passages:

The first:

Is it starting to look like Labour has a women problem? It certainly is for the 7,000-strong group of women members, councillors and activists who make up Labour Women’s Declaration and had a stall at last year’s party conference refused. It is for Lesbian Labour, who were also stopped from exhibiting at last year’s conference. It is for Dr Karen Ingala-Smith, the formidable feminist campaigner who compiles a list of women killed in the UK each year which is then read out in Parliament by Jess Phillips every International Women’s Day, and who had her membership rejected after she made a few gender-critical joke tweets featuring kittens. And of course it is for me, ostracised for voicing not only my own opinions but those of thousands of others who are starting to question the Party they have dedicated so much of their lives to.

Out of an already shocking list of examples of the Labour Party going out of its way to silence critics of the cult of trans and of gender ideology, one of the most shocking for me was the exclusion of Lesbian Labour from the party conference. There’s been an organised and recognised input into the party via the Labour Movement from Lesbians since the 1970’s at least and to see this group excluded because of the influence of the cult of trans is extremely concerning.

And the second:

Sitting on the front bench with Keir are MPs who defended Corbyn or remained silent when the rest of us were calling him out for antisemitism. Sitting on our front bench is an MP who was voted in as a Conservative. Not sitting on the front bench, however, is a single MP who believes that biological sex can’t be erased at the stroke of a pen. To go into a workplace, when nothing you say or experience as a politician or a woman is of any worth — what’s progressive about that?

What indeed. The Labour Party is indeed in a very bad way if there is a lack of acceptance of biological reality on its front bench. That the party has gone this way makes me agree with Ms Duffield that the Labour Party has a woman problem and is no longer an accepting space for women who go into politics to make a positive difference by speaking uncomfortable truths rather than comforting, or coerced, lies.

I find it a thing of horror that so many in the Labour leadership are as Ms Duffield described. A party like that is not only bad for women, but also very bad for the nation as a whole.