Thread by @S0uthRiding

@davecoviddave Way, way back in the early 1970s I was a young child and dimly aware there were elections where people had to choose between Tory and Labour (other parties were irrelevant where we lived). 1/12

@davecoviddave I gathered it had a lot to do with whether you thought people should largely be free to choose what to do with their own money or whether the govt should be able to take some in taxes to look after people who need a helping hand. 2/12

@davecoviddave No brainer, I thought, I'll vote Labour when the time comes. And I did. 1983, 1987, 1992, 1997 and all the council elections in between. Labour finally won the GE in '97 & I was elated, but then disillusioned as they stuck to the Tory policies I wanted to see the back of. 3/12

@davecoviddave 2010: Labour lost, Tory/LibDem coalition govt took power. Austerity! Things were grim. 2015: Surely Labour will win, I think. Incredibly they didn't, then made themselves unelectable by picking Jeremy Corbyn as leader and letting Momentum dominate the policy-setting process. 4/12

@davecoviddave 2016: Labour leadership stood back and watched while Johnson and his chums won the Brexit referendum by telling outright lies. Corbyn went on holiday during the campaign, FFS. Over the next few years it became plain that they’ve utterly lost touch 5/12

@davecoviddave with the ordinary people I'd always thought were at the forefront of their policies. They hadn’t listened for years to people who expressed concern about widescale immigration and lack of community cohesion – no dialogue, written off as bigots and racists. Red flag. 6/12

@davecoviddave In recent years we’ve seen the Labour Party adopt identity politics as its main platform. Women’s rights had always been an afterthought, but now they’re seen as a hindrance to the fashionable cause of gender ideology. Ordinary women with concerns about their safety 7/12

@davecoviddave and the safety of their children and their elderly and disabled relatives are now bigots and transphobes. The misogyny is off the scale. With every year that passes, I am less and less surprised that they can't regain power. 8/12

@davecoviddave I can't vote for them myself. I am disgusted by the Tories in many ways, but on current showing they know the difference between the two sexes and they know it matters. For me, this is absolutely fundamental. 9/12

@davecoviddave I can’t vote for a party that doesn’t grasp that binary sex is real and can’t be identified out of. I can’t vote for a party which has no grasp of safeguarding children and other vulnerable people. I can’t vote for a party that would chuck women’s sport under the bus 10/12

@davecoviddave and would throw open women’s prisons, refuges, rape crisis services, changing rooms and toilets to allcomers as long as they utter the magic words ‘I identify as a woman’. For years I’ve been holding on hoping Labour will have a Road to Damascus moment. 11/12

@davecoviddave Can’t see that happening now. We need to start again in UK politics. The current model is broken. #sexmatters #labourlosingwomen /Fin