I expect many LDV readers will by now have seen the interview where Ed was asked the question “can women have penises?” 10 times. He dodges and dances around the point, trying to find the middle ground that will please both sides. He inevitably fails and erodes trust from everyone, who rightfully see a politician trying to avoid saying what he really thinks.
Imagine, if you will, an alternate timeline. The first time he’s asked, Ed answers Piers with “yes. Trans women are women, and some trans women have not had bottom surgery, therefore some women have penises”. The next day, that quote is splashed across the headlines. “Lib dem leader says some women have penises”.
Does that scare you, dear reader? And, more importantly, should it scare you?
In this article, I hope to convince you that it is both best for the party AND best for the country to revel in this sort of controversy. State our liberal values, especially the ones we’re afraid will put people off, and state them as loudly and unambiguously as possible.
And so, we come to Nigel Farage. What can we say about him?
- He likes lager
- His political views are abhorrent, but because he consistently and unambiguously says what he stands for, the electorate trust him
- He has probably done more to change the political landscape of the UK in the 21st century than any other single person (despite failing to be elected to parliament multiple times, and still having a parliamentary party that could fit in a pedalo)
… but how has he done it? Well…
The Overton Window is the range of ideas a person or population are prepared to see as “reasonable”. It’s not the same as “ideas you agree with”. As a silly example, people might disagree about pineapple on pizza being tasty or disgusting, but even people who don’t like it generally accept that it’s an optional topping on many pizza menus. Ketchup on ice cream, on the other hand, is a food combination that seems not only disgusting to many of us, but also ridiculous.
The Overton window puts ideas on a spectrum. “Policy” sits in the middle, flanked on either side by “popular” ideas, which are followed by “sensible”, “acceptable”, “radical” and “unthinkable” ideas, in that order. As society changes, the window can shift, moving some ideas towards the reasonable and popular centre, and others away, towards the radical and unthinkable fringes.
While more mainstream politicians have been following the Overton window, Mr Farage has been directing it. He was happy to look ridiculous to push the most uncompromising version of his agenda, so he became the darling of the mainstream media. Controversy generates attention, which generates money, which brings his face and his ideas into everyone’s minds. For a lot of people, ideas we’re regularly exposed to eventually seem more reasonable. And so, the window shifts…
… the UK political landscape is in desperate need of a voice, any voice, to shift the window towards a better, kinder, fairer society. I believe we owe it to society to be that voice. Our policies are there already, and if not us, who else?
And I know that scares a lot of people. But what is it that won our unprecedented 72 MPs? As far as I can tell, it came down to 2 things:
- Elections are, ultimately, a zero-sum game. Both the big 2 parties went into that election with their reputation in the toilet, and, hey, 650 MPs were going to be elected whatever happened
- Ed Davey and his attention-seeking stunts
We can’t rely on the first point (another party might well remove their collective heads from various orifices), so we need to lean harder on the second. Wetsuits and bungee jumping are all very well while Ed is out and about, but not really an option once he gets back to Westminster. We need to use our policies to keep up the attention seeking momentum between election cycles.
To misquote Hamilton (the musical, rather than our Party Leader in Scotland), “If you stand for nothing, Ed, what will you fall for?”
* Jude Parker is a Lib Dem member based in London.
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33 Comments
An interesting article. Where I would disagree with you is that I believe Nigel Farage has been skilful at voicing the opinions of a significant section of the electorate who feel ignored and not represented by the mainstream parties – people who have often not voted because they don’t like any of the parties on offer. It is not so much that he has shifted public opinion towards his position…it is more than he has given visibility to those views and has gained support due to this. We see this in the Reform Party membership where most members have never been a member of any political party previously, and many did not even vote regularly prior to them joining.
The lesson from this is that Farage’s successes is not due to him just being controversial but due to him being willing to voice controversial opinions shared by millions. If we believe that stating controversial views will gain us support – think again, unless those views are shared by millions.
He likes lager
Farage doesn’t like lager. That’s just part of his man-of-the-people act. Away from the cameras he drinks red wine.
Might it (also) be that those who own the main stream media and govern the BBC are partial/adicted to trying to attract through one or more of th following list: the extreme, the bizarre, the, easy to grasp/the connected with, fear and/or.dominance and/or greed?
This comment has been removed as it includes sources widely believed to represent misinformation.
Why on earth is LDV allowing highly questionable websites to be promoted here?
MediaBiasFactCheck concludes the following:
“Moon of Alabama utilizes questionable sources such as RT News, Fox News, as well as credible sources such as Bloomberg, NY Times, Haaretz, The Jerusalem Post, Politico, cisac.fsi.stanford.edu, and blogs such as johnhelmer.org.
… we find that Moon of Alabama has become sympathetic toward Russia and the war in Ukraine, often citing misinformation. For example, in this article they claim a false flag Neo-Nazis In Ukraine Fake Incidents To Gain More ‘Western’ Support – Updated. Media credibility rater Newsguard has detailed an extensive list of false and misleading claims regarding Ukraine. Generally, Moon of Alabama is a pro-Russian conspiracy website.”
‘Does that scare you, dear reader? And, more importantly, should it scare you’
It doesn’t matter what the reader thinks – it matters what the voting public perceive.
It’s a hill the liberal left has decided to sacrifice itself on. As long as it understands that it continues to lose integrity amongst many voters.
Concerning “small boat” immigration, might the article below be of interest/relevance?
ps://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/people-crossing-the-english-channel-in-small-boats/
The answer to that question is not that difficult, is it? Biological women do not have penises.
This answer has no impact on the rights of trans-gender people.
The party has got itself into a right mess on this issue.
1.7% of the population is intersex. That’s a higher proportion than are coeliac. Biology – never mind concepts of gender – biology is not binary and never has been. By all means bury me on that hill.
I’m liking basic angle of this post. We don’t shift the window by appeasing it.
@Jack:
The percentage of the population with intersex features AT BIRTH is extremely small indeed: best estimates are from 0.02% – 0.05% of the population.
The vast majority of transgender people, like non-transgender people, have NO intersex features.
Studies that claim 1.7% of the population with intersex features include towards end-of-life illnesses such as Klienfelter Syndrome and late onset congenital adrenal hyperplasia that involve chromosomal abnormalities.
Intersex is a complete red herring. It’s totally irrelevant as a basis for intergender identities.
Great article Jude.
We do need to advance towards the sound of gunfire, and we Liberal Democrats do well when we assert ourselves in a controversial situation.
Grimond’s opposition to the Suez intervention was controversial at the time (supposedly appeasing the alledged “Hitler of the Nile” was against the grain of public opinion) but it inspired many activists who help us rebuild in the 1960s.
The reason why we won so many seats (and why Starmer is prime minister, despite being less popular than Jeremy Corbyn) is because Reform split the right of centre vote, thus allowing us and Labour to win seats we would not otherwise have taken. Historically FPTP has usually favoured the Conservatives because the vote for parties on the broad left was split. We are deluding ourselves if we think Ed’s stunts won it! Of course Labour is also deluded if it thinks it won the election for any reason other than the fact that people wanted anyone but the Tories to run the country and therefore voted for Reform, Labour and the LibDems in varying proportions.
Is it possible to say that, in my view, a woman cannot have a penis , because I define ‘woman’ without reference to internal feelings or adherence to gender stereotypes (an ontological, not moral, position), and receive feedback on what I got wrong without being accused of a moral failing?
You will not receive feedback on what you got wrong, because you didn’t get anything wrong.
I’m in favour of transgender rights; have a wider family member who has transitioned. For this very reason I’m dead against bogus claims about intersex or women with penises.
We need
Trans policy is not simple, but of you start from the premise that trans men are men and trans women are women, then the situation becomes somewhat complicated.
Trans women who have not had bottom surgery still have penises and, much less talked about, trans men who have not had bottom surgery (and it’s very difficult surgery) still have vaginas.
It’s only if you go along with this nonsense about biological sex which isn’t binary anyway, that you get stupid questions being asked by interviewers.
What we should be saying about this whole issue as a party is that we want to change the law so that the very sensible definitions of gender that we thought applied before the SC ruling do apply and that biological sex has nothing to do with it.
I have different stats, but even if yours are accurate, that’s still a section of the population and does not remotely constitute a herring of any colour – it is evidence that biology is not binary and has a degree of fluidity. I didn’t say that most trans people are intersex, I said that the presence of ANY intersex people is evidence that biology is not as binarised as is commonly understood.
“Intersex is a complete red herring. It’s totally irrelevant as a basis for intergender identities.”
It isn’t. It is a legitimate part of the discussion on the general questions of sex, gender and identity. We often see comments such as “a man is not and can never be a woman”. Unfortunately the scientific evidence is that things aren’t quite as clear cut as some might like. What might be true for 99.9% of us isn’t true for all of us.
About one in 15000 women are born with XY chromosomes. This is normally regarded as being a male characteristic and yet they were classified as female at birth. Problems only show up at the age of puberty.
Around 1 in 500 to 1,000 newborn males have an additional X chromosome, a condition known as Klinefelter syndrome. This can often go unnoticed due to the symptoms being mild but not always.
This is not to say that all questions on this issue can be answered by clear scientific evidence, but some can.
To determine just how many, Nature (the scientific magazine) is always a good starting point:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-01311-1
No, Jack, I have the SAME stats as you. I’m well aware of the study that puts intersex at 1.7%. But that is because it includes various end-of-life conditions that lead to chromosomal abnormalities, notably late onset congenital adrenal hyperplasia that alone accounts for 1.5% out of the 1.7%.
Such conditions are not what the vast majority of people understand by intersex and, of course, do not underlie gender fluidity.
Likewise most of the tiny number of people with true intersex features do not have a gender fluid or binarised identity. Why would they? Intersex anomalies do not underpin fluid gender identity
The vast majority of people who are non-binary have no intersex features.
Stating that the law should recognise gender identity rather than biological sex implies defining it by someone’s internal feelings, which is neither falsifiable nor scientifically testable. And if it’s not just internal feelings, then it’s conforming to conservative expectations of how a “man” or a “woman” should look, dress or behave in public.
Sex is binary, inasmuch as there are only sperm or eggs, or the DNA that produces one or the other. I don’t see why the existence of DSDs is relevant here; while they may affect secondary sexual characteristics, they do not change that fundamental fact. Furthermore, this falls into the Sorites Paradox: the existence of rare exceptions does not justify redefining entire categories. It’s one thing to say it makes the boundaries blured, it’s another to call it “nonsense”. What is the argument in bringing them up? Is it that: DSDs exist, therefore men and women are sometimes difficult to define, and therefore identifying as one makes you one? That is not a logically coherent argument. Moreover, this approach misuses people with DSDs, who often do not want to be invoked in such arguments.
I see that many commenters have taken the bait on a niche issue mentioned primarily to illustrate a point about political skill, rather than to make an argument on the issue per se. It says more about the priorities of political keyboard warriors than of ordinary voters, who tend not to care much about it either way.
To return to a more pertinent point, @George Cooper is wrong about the 2024 General Election, certainly as far as the Lib Dems are concerned. The Lib Dem gains were the result of increases in the Lib Dem vote in the constituencies, with Lib Dems having the largest proportion of their seats won on >50% of the vote.
In 2019 LD got 3,696,419 votes
In 2024 LD got 3,519,143 votes
How is getting 177,000 less votes classed as an overall gain . For once the party benefitted from the oddities that Fptp can throw up now and then. The collapse in Tory support across the UK helped every party. The lost 229 deposits are very telling – the party is almost non existent in far too many constituencies .
@Greg Hyde: I’m talking about the rises in Lib Dem vote share in the constituencies they won. Not the party’s nationwide share. My point is that where we won, it was on the back of our increased constituency-level vote share, rather than any “split” in the right-wing vote. This is also true of Labour, to a lesser extent. They made a lot of gains through 2019 Brexit Party (now Reform UK) voters switching back to their usual Labour vote.
It’s highly simplistic to treat the electorate as two blocks, left-wing and right-wing, who hardly ever switch sides. Actually they do a lot. It’s equally false to say that the Tories won in the 1980s due to a “split left-wing” vote. Actually the Tories won in 1983 on the back of straight Labour→Tory switching.
@ Alex,
“They {Labour} made a lot of gains through 2019 Brexit Party (now Reform UK) voters switching back to their usual Labour vote.”
You seem to be unaware that the Brexit Party (now Reform) largely stood aside in 2019 in favour of the Tories. They either didn’t stand candidates or they didn’t campaign with any seriousness in the vast majority of seats. Their total vote share was around 2% and they returned no MPs.
Not so in 2024. My own constituency only went Labour because of the split in the right wing vote. Labour’s total share was 33.4% which isn’t at all consistent with winning 400+ seats. This was only possible because of the split in the right wing vote.
You’re probably right that the benefit was more to Labour than Lib Dems but to be sure you need to do some analysis to back up your assertion.
@Peter Martin: transgender identities are not correlated at all to the presence of intersex features. In that sense it IS a complete red herring.
The overwhelming majority of transgender people have no intersex features.
Likewise, most people with intersex features have a clearly dominant sex.
@ Alex Macfie, I’m afraid Greg Hyde’s comments are compelling, Alex. Are you happy to see the party so much reliant on such a narrow geographical base in the prosperous South East of England ? In the long term this makes it vulnerable…. eggs in one basket and all that.
It is worth asking of those running the party these days whether they have ever bothered to do in depth research as to why the party’s support in such old long term strongholds as Colne Valley, Berwick, Southport, the Scottish Borders and mid-Wales has evaporated. It’s useful to remind oneself that the UK parliament consists of a world beyond Potters Bar.
“Sex [in humans and most other eukaryotes] is binary, inasmuch as there are only sperm or eggs”
This is the concept of anisogamy (which I only discovered in the last 60 hours or so). The idea is that disruptive selection favoured two gamete strategies – large and static (defined as female) and small and mobile (male) in multicellular organisms. The theory sets out to explain reproductive strategies, and has been around since Darwin. Interestingly there are certain molluscs that produce both female and male gametes at the same time – anisogamy says they are both male and female.
It will be interesting to see whether the theory can successfully integrate the data from molecular biology now emerging or indeed the range of human phenotypes and genotypes. If it can’t a new theory will be required to explain gender and sexuality in humans at least.
None of this is to say that trans people must be required to conform or deserve to be excluded or worse or any other such nonsense.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anisogamy#Evolution
@ Chris Moore,
“transgender identities are not correlated at all to the presence of intersex features”
You’re making an unreferenced assertion.
Reference #4 in the Wiki entry on the topic :
“A 2012 clinical review paper reported that between 8.5% and 20% of people with intersex variations experienced gender dysphoria.”
So whilst no-one is suggesting that the correlation is 100% it is nevertheless not 0%. So you can’t say “not correlated at all”, unless you can quote a different scientific study in support.
Peter
” “transgender identities are not correlated at all to the presence of intersex features”
You’re making an unreferenced assertion.”
The Collins Concise English Dictionary defines correlated as: To place or be placed in a mutual, complementary, or reciprocal relationship.
If a maximum of 20% of intersex people then I think it fair to say there is no correlation between intersex and transgender identities. If you can produce a paper that shows over 50% of intersex people experience gender dysphoria then you would have a case but if you can’t then not.
@ Andrew,
I’m afraid you are just making it up to suit your own purposes. Mathematically, a correlation coefficient can have any value between -1 and +1. There’s nothing special about either +0.5 or -0.5.
A value of +1 indicates a perfect positive linear relationship, where variables move together in the same direction, while -1 signifies a perfect negative linear relationship, where they move in opposite directions. A coefficient of 0 means there is no association between the variables.
So, it’s not true to say there is no correlation but it would be true to say there is at least a weak correlation.
To do the comparison properly would require a similar survey of the non-intersex population but it’s unlikely that the figures would be comparable. A weakness of the method would be the degree to which respondents can be relied upon to answer questions truthfully and allow access to medical records.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_coefficient
” Away from the cameras he drinks red wine.”
So what? I’m sure many LibDems like the same tipple.
I must confess that I drink real ale in a pub, which I like, but would feel somewhat self conscious drinking red wine there even though I like that too! There’s no reason why I should. It could be a personal failing. Apart from that it doesn’t mean anything.
There are plenty of reasons, which do mean something, to not vote for Mr Farage though!
– Peter Martin
Farage has built his political brand around appearing authentic and unfiltered—someone who ‘tells it like it is’ without political calculation. It is therefore worth noting that a central plank of his public persona is faked.
I don’t know why you felt the need to argue this point.
Difficult to find raw figures (sorry) but charts at https://election2024.electoral-reform.org.uk/ clearly show that the majority of seats won both by Labour and by Lib Dems in 2024 were won on >40% of the constituency vote. Both those parties had a respectable number of seats won on >50% of the vote, while the Tories won a single seat on an absolute majority of votes (Harrow East) and most of their seats on <40%. This suggests that both Labour and Lib Dems mostly won by increased constituency vote shares. Conservative→Reform switching may have helped Labour win back some Red Wall seats, but these are only a part of the overall picture.
What @David Raw calls a “narrow” voter base has netted the Lib Dems 72 seats. While I certainly concur with developing our “old wins” where we have fallen back, those “old wins” were scattered and not particularly safe for us at the time. Let’s not forget that back in the days when we held seats that he mentions we were down on <30 seats. There’s no such thing as a safe Lib Dem seat (except maybe Orkney & Shetland) but I consider a voter base that’s based on clear demographics and shared values more helpful in the long term than a scattered voter based that was defined mainly by local factors and tradition.