Labour is obsessed with ‘middle class’ issues such as trans rights says former MP
Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner ‘take the knee’ to support Black Lives Matter in 2020 (Image: Published on Keir Starmer’s X feed)
Tom Harris was a Labour MP for 14 years but now he has revealed why he can’t support the party any more – and even voted Conservative in general elections. He said: “Labour is not a serious party of government and Starmer himself is a lawyer, not a politician.”
Mr Harris was an MP in Glasgow from 2001 to 2015, and served as a Transport Minister in a Labour government led by former Prime Minister Tony Blair. But he said Labour had become obsessed with “middle class” issues such as trans rights and Black Lives Matter, and no longer represented working people. He urged Labour to cut immigration and deport people who are here illegally.
Mr Harris said: “For ten years I have been screaming into the storm, desperately pleading with my old party to get a grip, to grow up, to smell the coffee. To ignore the fashionable activists and their causes, to listen to ordinary voters and to act on their concerns.
“I’ve been warning them to clamp down on immigration and to devise a system that allows us to deport many, many thousands of people who should not be here, and to devise some way around human rights legislation in order to do so.”
The former MP revealed that he voted Conservative in the 2017 general election, in order to stop Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader at t he time, becoming Prime Minister. He had to keep it a secret because he was still a Labour Party member, and didn’t quit until 2018.
He also publicly endorsed the Conservatives in 2019, when Mr Corbyn was still Labour leader.
But even now that Mr Corbyn has been replaced by Sir Keir Starmer, he still can’t back the party he joined when he was 20 years old.
Writing on his Substack newsletter, Mr Harris said: “Labour has, since 2015, become ever more captured, not just by gender ideology (and even the recent Supreme Court ruling on the definition of a woman in equality law seems not to have sunk in with many MPs) but by racial identity activists. Remember when Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner took a knee in their House of Commons offices? I still blush for them whenever I think of that.
“There is no doubt in my mind that ministers’ lack of enthusiasm to hold an inquiry into the Pakistani grooming gangs is down to electoral considerations. Just as Labour’s silence on the Batley Grammar School teacher forced into hiding for offending some people because he showed his pupils some cartoons, or the teenager who was publicly humiliated by his local police force because he accidentally kicked a book along the ground of the school dining hall. And that’s all it was – a book that some people just happen to revere but so what?
“And then there’s the betrayal of Israel, a matter that will need some exploration in a separate post. Suffice to say for now that the only liberal democracy in the Middle East, which suffered so calamitously on October 7, 2023, and which is on the frontline in the global war against Islamism, should be able to rely on the UK government for support. Instead it was betrayed by a foreign secretary and a prime minister more worried about losing votes domestically than in maintaining their previously principled support for Israel.
“The UK government should not change one dot of foreign policy for fear of the reaction by British Muslim voters.”
