NB: I felt I had to write the following to calm down! Regardless of your views on transgender people today’s been maddening. If it makes it easier, replace the word transgender with ‘left handed’, or ‘red haired’. Our Prime Minister lacks even a modicum of humanity and is not fit for office.
In this, LGBTQ+ month, I rather fear that we have witnessed one of the most shocking and sad episodes that form their chequered past. Our ruling party and their emotionally inept leader have hit anew, stupefyingly awful nadir.
On Wednesday, the mother of a transgender child, who was brutally murdered
because she had the courage to be who she really was, was a guest of the Labour leader Kier Starmer in the House of Commons public gallery.
Rishi Sunak then proceeded to make a crass and demeaning political point about his party’s stance on transgenderism compared to that of Labour’s, coupled with a follow up ‘joke’.
Just imagine that, in the week your child’s killers had been sentenced for their murder, a joke effectively at your beloved daughter’s expense, was made in full view of the public. By the Prime Minister. For political gain.
Rishi Sunak is a well educated man. He is clearly successful in finance and business, and in marrying into money. Well done Rishi.
That alone, is not qualification enough to qualify you to be public representative number one. You need empathy, humanity and emotional intelligence. Couple those with a sharp political brain and you have one hell of public servant. You need to actually care, not just say you care. You need to understand that your words and actions will affect people, not just materially but mentally. I know from personal experience that at any fee paying school, emotional intelligence is not on the curriculum. Which means most of the past ten years worth of cabinet ministers aren’t even aware of the concept. Eton et al, teach people to be nice to each other for crying out loud!
An actual, heartfelt well done is due to Kier Starmer. His evident rage was incredibly well controlled and I have a new found respect for the fact he managed to control his obviously overwhelmed emotions. He clearly has some.
And then, immediately afterwards, we see the most obvious example of gaslighting from our government, or from anyone, I’ve ever seen.
Jeremy Hunt, when asked if Sunak had tried to make political gain from the situation, said he did not. Repeatedly, and without explaining why. But we’d literally just watched it happen. The television poured the acidic comments directly into our eyes, and the Chancellor then told us it hadn’t happened. If I poured a glass of water over your head then told you repeatedly that I hadn’t you’d think me mad. But that was what played out on our screens today.
And then, as the day drew to a close, the PM invited the family of Brianna Ghey to Downing Street to talk about online safety, something which Brianna’s parents are passionate about. But it’s taken his gaffe and the massive outcry to make this meeting happen. And it won’t, according to the invitation, be about anything but that.
It’s NOT to apologise .
It’s NOT to listen to the parents of a transgender child and maybe consider the way his party ‘deals’ with those issues.
If I were those parents, I’d tell him to get stuffed. His smiling face in PMQ’s today made me wretch. Prime Minister Sunak made at a jibe at the expense of a dead transgender child. While her parents watched from metres away. I still can’t believe that really happened.
We all deserve much better than this. LGBTQ+ history is littered with examples of thoughtlessness (at best) and at worst sneering hatred. But the good has always risen to the top. May Sunak quickly sink to the bottom, and live in the relative poverty of life with his billionaire wife. This abhorrence has no place in a civilised, caring society.