Britain just went so woke it’s barely believable – and Labour’s to blame for this madness
The public sector has continued its relentless pursuit of political correctness, enabled by Labour and the Left, writes Giles Sheldrick.
The relentless march of political correctness has intensified under Labour (Image: PA)
Few state-run organisations have slavishly worshipped at the altar of woke more than the NHS.
Enabled by the Labour Party, unions, and an untouchable wider public sector whose employees are free to be whatever they want to be, our health service is now so pitifully out of step with the people it is meant to serve (and the bulk of its staff) that it is hard to know where to start.
So mind-bogglingly ridiculous is the NHS that almost every metric, from waiting lists to cancer targets, indicates abject failure.
Yet it persists in pushing and pursuing an agenda that forced seven dedicated nurses to take it to court to ensure they could get undressed at work without a man being present.
Yes. You read that correctly. Nurses, paid a pittance for an unforgiving frontline job, were stonewalled because their nodding dog bosses were so preoccupied with a devotion to political correctness.
These dedicated public servants were forced to take County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust to an employment tribunal because it refused to ban a biological male trans woman from underdressing in front of them.
The trust – and it’s not the only one – was so frightened of upsetting one trans employee that it failed to pay any attention to common sense, genuine concerns from women about their safety, and the law.
The Darlington nurses who won a landmark legal victory against the NHS (Image: North News & Pictures Ltd)
Because of Britain’s slow and painful descent into the bottomless pit of political correctness – aided and abetted by Labour, the Left, and an army of human rights lawyers – they had to launch an expensive legal action to force a court to state that women have the right to undress in a female-only changing room.
Incredibly, they are not the first, and they will not be the last.
Madness doesn’t quite do it justice.
Shapeshifting PM Sir Keir Starmer – adept at facing in two different directions at once – has hardly helped put a lid on this insanity.
In 2021 he said it was “not right” for former Labour MP Rosie Duffield to say only women have a cervix. In 2024 he said she was “biologically right about that”.
Any number of politicians have struggled to state the irrefutable biological fact that it is impossible for a woman to be born with an appendage.
And so this lunacy has been allowed to fester and grow.
To give you some idea of how irredeemably stupid County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust is, the judgement in the nurses’ case came approaching a year after the Supreme Court – a collection of Britain’s finest legal minds – ruled only biological sex matters when it comes to equity law.
It means someone born male, but who wants to be a woman, isn’t. And absolutely should not be allowed to use a female changing room.
Yet in the NHS that hardly matters.
Some trusts require patients to state their sex before being operated on, with options including non-binary, intersex, questioning/unsure.
Others have asked whether those in for treatment “think of myself as female, think of myself as male, think of myself in another way, prefer not to say or unable to answer”.
This relentless diversity and equality drive continues despite more than 6 million patients languishing on waiting lists and as resident doctors have abandoned their patients and walked out on strike 14 times in three years.
This period of unprecedented public sector piffle will have a special chapter in the annals of this country’s rich history when it comes to be written. It will surely be looked upon as a time when Britain lost its mind.
