Cardiff West MP ‘should not be Chair of Commons committee scrutinising trans rights bill’

Martin Shipton

An MP who left the Labour Party claiming she had been bullied because of her gender-critical views has criticised a decision to appoint Cardiff West MP Alex Barros-Curtis as chair of a House of Commons committee.

Canterbury MP Rosie Duffield, who now sits as an independent, argues in a social media post that it is inappropriate for Mr Barros-Curtis, whom she describes as a trans-rights activist, to chair the committee scrutinising the controversial Conversion Practices Bill.

Opponents of the Bill say it would criminalise a mother who won’t call her 11-year-old daughter “they”; a father who throws away testosterone his teenage daughter bought online; a lesbian who tells her trans-identifying niece it’s fine to be a lesbian; a teacher enforcing school policy on single-sex toilets; and a GP who accurately records the sex of a man who identifies as a woman.

In her post, Ms Duffield states: “There are 650 MPs in Parliament. Yet the one MP chosen by @UKLabour to Chair the Bill Committee for the controversial, dangerous and dismally bad draft legislation, the Conversion Practices Bill, is Alex Barros-Curtis.

“Until July 2024, when Alex was given a very safe Labour seat in Cardiff, he was the Head of the Labour Party’s Governance and Legal Unit in London. This was a department set up to investigate complaints against members of the Labour Party. Complaints of antisemitism, Islamophobia, abuse, and of course latterly, mostly women holding legally-protected ‘Gender Critical’ (sex realist) beliefs. Alex oversaw the investigation of hundreds of members who liked or tweeted gender critical or feminist views. I was one of them. He investigated me, as a sitting Labour MP, for 13 months.

“13 months to ‘investigate’ one like of one tweet. I had a great lawyer, one of the names we’re all now familiar with, and I had to crowdfund to pay for his (excellent) work.

“They first tried in 2020. But the screenshots crudely attached to that passive aggressive, threatening-sounding email from Labour Party admin staff were so risible that I replied that it was too ridiculous for me to waste my precious time on. They left it. Years of Starmer bumbling and stuttering through interviews about whether he had spoken to me, whether he supported me, etc followed. My feminist sins continued apace.

“And then I ‘liked’ a tweet by my gender critical comedian friend @Glinner [Graham Linehan]. He had mocked Eddie ‘Suzy’ [comedian Eddie Izzard] for comparing his choice to wear traditional women’s clothing, fake plastic breasts and nails, to those being persecuted by the Nazis during WWII. I found his sarcasm, as an award-winning comedy writer in the face of such offensive narcissism, amusing and so ‘liked’ it. I found it absurd and obscene that Izzard, an extremely privileged and wealthy man, who openly changed his ‘gender’ at will, should write himself into history falsely as someone who would have been oppressed due to a circumstance beyond his control. We all know the groups who were tortured, starved and killed…

“There is obviously more to my story, I will tell it all, it’s just one chapter of the years of spiteful abusive and bullying practices meted out to me by the Labour Party managers. Not those who’d achieved office on merit, or even unexpectedly, but those in the club, often having failed to be elected themselves.

“So Barros-Curtis, who we were repeatedly told led ‘the many independent inquiries into women members and MPs like me’, now often stands as a trans-rights activist on the Labour backbenches. He has also been gifted the role of Chair of this Committee and is a huge supporter of this Bill. And I am not a part of the Bill Committee, although plenty of TRA [trans rights activist] MPs are.

“Does that sound like the democratic scrutiny of legislation to you?”

Supported

Ms Duffield was supported by the veteran comedian John Cleese, who wrote: “People like Barris-Curtis [sic], who have no understanding of humour or irony, should never be put in charge of any matters involving metaphor, paradox, simile, sarcasm, humorous exaggeration and, obviously, irony.

“It’s like making a colour blind person a judge in a painting competition.

“Remember, he understands almost nothing about meaning, which depends entirely on context.

“Nevertheless, he is ideal for running this Labour Party.”

Mr Barros-Curtis said: “This claim fundamentally misunderstands both the appointment and the role of a Joint Committee Chair. The Chair is appointed by the cross-party Committee itself, and has a responsibility to oversee proceedings fairly, ensuring that all members can contribute, and that the legislation is scrutinised rigorously and impartially.

“Political disagreement over the draft Bill is entirely legitimate. But suggesting that the appointment of a Chair demonstrates bias is a serious allegation. It questions both the judgment of the cross-party Committee and the Chair’s ability to discharge their duties impartially.”