Emily Thornberry: Labour has ended up in the ‘wrong place’ on trans people

Senior Labour MP Dame Emily Thornberry says her party has “ended up in the wrong place” when it comes to transgender people.

The Islington South and Finsbury MP, who also chairs the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, said there had been “social conservatism” promoted in Labour.

Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Political Thinking podcast, she said new Green Party MP Hannah Spencer, who won the Gorton and Denton by-election last week, “spoke like a Labour MP”.

Of her own party, she said: “I think that we have been trying to be something that we’re not, and I don’t think that we need to do that.”

She particularly pointed to the influence of Sir Keir Starmer’s former chief of staff Morgan McSweeney, who quit Downing Street last month under immense pressure.

“I think that he was trying to push us into a place that didn’t come naturally to us, and therefore people didn’t follow their instincts so much,” she said.

She added: “I think some of this social conservatism that was being promoted did not come naturally to us. We are not a socially conservative party.

“I dread even saying this… but I think that we’ve ended up in the wrong place on trans, and we’ve done that by treading very self-consciously and not actually following our hearts, which is that trans people are on the margins, they are vulnerable.

“If the Labour Party doesn’t look after trans people, what are we about?

“They’re most likely to get beaten up. They’re the ones who are most likely to have prejudice against them. We should not be indulging in anything that marginalises them even more.”

Education Secretary and women’s minister Bridget Phillipson has been accused of dithering over guidance on transgender people’s use of single-sex spaces after a landmark legal judgment last year.

A code of practice, updated after April’s Supreme Court ruling that the term “woman” in equality legislation referred to biological sex, was shared with the Government at the start of September.

The proposed code of practice will be used by businesses and other organisations to inform their provision of single and separate-sex services such as toilets and changing rooms.

After that ruling, Labour banned trans women from attending the Labour Party women’s conference, in what is understood to be considered the least restrictive approach to the conference that still complies with the law.