Andy Burnham’s phoney feminism – spiked

Could Britain be about to get its first female Labour prime minister? Fear not, there’s no sign of Angela Rayner or Lucy Powell stepping up to the plate. It’s Andy Burnham himself who could be ‘Labour’s first woman PM’, a senior Labour source told the Spectator last week, because he is ‘genuinely passionate about all those traditionally female-oriented issues’.

The Labour source who misgendered Burnham went on to explain that, unlike female Conservative prime ministers, a woman Labour leader would ‘have an unashamedly female agenda, focussed on health, education, family finances and issues like safer streets, social care, online safety for kids’. Issues, we were told, that are ‘disproportionately important to women’. And the person with these priorities? ‘Along comes Andy, surrounded by female advisers and backers, but more importantly, genuinely passionate about all those traditionally female-oriented issues, and much less about bombs and budgets.’ Got that, girls? Leave the big stuff to the boys, and focus on the family finances. And Labour wonders why it has a woman problem.

To be fair, the idea that Burnham could be a female prime minister ‘in all but sex’, because he is interested in health and education, is no more bonkers than thinking a man can become a woman simply by donning a frock. And, in the not-too-distant past, this is exactly what Burnham thought.

In an exchange from 2022, our presumptive PM responded to the idea that female toilets should be a space only for women by saying, ‘I think it’s a minority view and quite a small minority view, actually’. He left no room for doubt: ‘I support trans rights, and I want that to be known.’ Indeed, Burnham supported reforming the Gender Recognition Act, and in 2019 co-wrote a letter urging the then Conservative government to back self-identification, which would allow people to change their legal sex without a medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria.

With Downing Street now firmly in his sights, it seems that Burnham now agrees that women should have access to single-sex spaces. The Supreme Court ruling on gender, he said last month, ‘has to be implemented’. And, it seems, he now accepts that he will not be Labour’s first female prime minister. ‘I want to put on record that I never have and never will describe myself as the first female Labour PM!’, he told Labour’s women MPs this week. Phew!

Burnham might not see himself as a literal woman, but he clearly does fancy himself as a feminist. He wants to put an end to the idea that the Labour Party has a woman problem and that Downing Street has been operating as a boys’ club. So he has promised the women in the Parliamentary Labour Party that, when he is in charge, there will no longer be any government meetings ‘with no women in the room’.

Plenty of Labour’s women MPs seem determined to hold him to his word. A group of them have drafted a letter, expected to be sent next week, urging him to address the ‘toxicity and misogyny’ within the party by appointing a named minister with responsibility for women in every department in government, and by ensuring that half of all government jobs go to women.

But Labour’s woman problem is hardly numerical. Almost half of all Labour MPs are women. And there is no lack of shiny-haired women in the top jobs. There’s Shabana Mahmood in charge at the Home Office, Yvette Cooper at the Foreign Office, Rachel Reeves at the Treasury and Bridget Phillipson in the Department for Education. Other than the role of prime minister, nearly all the major offices of state are currently held by women.

Yet still, Burnham is under pressure to go further, and he seems all too happy to oblige. He will end the ‘culture of briefing against female ministers’, he told Labour’s women this week. Anyone who undermines female members of his team will be sacked, he has promised. But what if female ministers deserve criticism? Whether it’s raising employers’ National Insurance contributions or pledging to increase inheritance tax paid by farmers, Rachel Reeves has been a disaster as chancellor. Phillipson’s VAT raid on private schools has cost more money than it has saved and forced hundreds of schools to close. Shabana Mahmood’s one-in, one-out migration deal with France has been an abject failure. It is neither toxic nor misogynistic to point this out.

And then there are Labour’s backbenchers. The party’s deputy leader, Lucy Powell, dismissed grooming gangs as a ‘dog whistle’ issue not worthy of discussion. MPs Stella Creasy and Nadia Whittome are busy trying to overturn the Supreme Court ruling on women. Kim Leadbeater seems to have more to say about women’s right to be helped to die than she does about their right to give birth safely.

If Labour has a woman problem, it lies with Labour’s women themselves. But Burnham’s patronising pledge to use quotas to guarantee women top jobs and then shield them from criticism will only make things worse. He needs to man up and reject such tokenistic demands.

If Andy Burnham wants to win back women voters, he should start by clearly stating that he knows what a woman is. He could pledge that the Supreme Court ruling will be fully implemented and women’s single-sex spaces will be protected. He could put a stop to the planned trial of puberty blockers for children. Defending women’s rights – whether that’s access to single-sex spaces, protecting white working-class girls from rape gangs or ensuring women can give birth without risking their lives – will take more than promoting a few woke women into well-paid government jobs.

Joanna Williams is a spiked columnist and author of How Woke Won. Follow her on Substack: cieo.substack.com/