LABOUR’S Shadow Attorney General Emily Thornberry has said that heckling of a colleague over gender law changes “wasn’t Parliament’s finest hour”.
She was responding to reports that Labour MP Rosie Duffield was jeered by her own colleagues when she defended the Government’s move to block changes on gender identification in Scotland.
Ms Thornberry told GB News: “I certainly heard one of my colleagues saying ‘no, Rosie, that just isn’t right’ and then I heard a lot when – maybe it was being drowned out by the Conservatives on the other side, who I could hear shouting.
“I mean, this was not a debate that was frankly Parliament’s finest hour in my view.
“On the one hand, we had the Conservatives wanting to stoke some sort of culture wars and on the other hand, we had the Scottish nationalists deciding that they were going to sort of fight the battle of nationalism again and that’s what it was all about.
“The last thing that anyone was thinking about, in my view, were the very marginalised people, those people who are some of the most vulnerable in our society, who are trans people.”
On the decision taken by Rishi Sunak she continued: : “We would not have done the same thing, we would have negotiated with the Scottish Parliament, because that is the only way that it can be sorted out.
“It can either be sorted out through the courts, which looks like it’s where it’s going to go, or it could have been done in a grown up way, which is the UK Parliament and the Scottish Parliament sitting down together…
“As a result, we need to sort out what happens in the middle. We need to be able to sort this out, and you should be doing that by discussing things. But all we got was Kemi Badenoch turning up the day before the legislation was passed. That’s not exactly negotiation, is it?”
Meanwhile when asked about today’s inflation figures, she said: “It’s good that the inflation rate has gone down, but nobody should be putting out the bunting – we’re talking about inflation over 10%.
“It’s still the third worst inflation figure for 40 years. So, nothing I’m afraid to celebrate. Maybe we’re going in the right direction but we’ve got a long way to go.”
On public sector pay awards stoking inflation, she said: “I don’t think that the Government is thinking of giving people above 10% pay rises, but they’re talking about giving them well below 10%.
“That means that people in public services are effectively being told that they should take pay cuts for the sake of inflation.
“And when we see that the inflation rate is not entirely the fault of the government but government behaviour has not exactly helped and so the inflation rate in this country is worse, because we’ve had 13 years of failure by this Conservative government.”
