Libby Brooks
speaker
48 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 20 Apr
Libby Brooks’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And our country will be woke no longer.
She is a former Holyrood politician who rose to be leader of the Scottish Labour Party between 2015 and 2017.
Whilst the electorate had, I think it's fair to say, completely fallen out of love with Scottish Labour, it was a really, really tough time to be elected.
in charge of the Labour Party in Scotland.
If you can imagine how difficult it is to navigate the constitutional debate in Scotland, particularly at that time.
And yes, I'll be interested to see how she builds on those skills of care and negotiation and balancing competing viewpoints in this next role.
Because it's in some ways very similar.
This pivot to the position on transgender rights happened under their former chief executive, Ruth Hunt.
My understanding is it happened after a significant consultation, which was to move Stonewall to become trans inclusive for the first time.
And at the time, she actually said in an interview with The Guardian that Stonewall had a moral responsibility to become trans inclusive.
And it's worth pointing out that that was not a wildly out there position to take at the time.
Only two years later in 2017, you had Theresa May, the then Conservative Prime Minister, pledging to reform the Gender Recognition Act to allow individuals to change their gender through self-declaration.
So as I say, it wasn't a sort of unusual position to take at that time.
But I think it's also fair to say that it was already at a point where this territory was becoming highly contested.
And already, you know, around 2015, a few years later, you had critics accusing Hunt of promoting a militant trans ideology movement.
I think it probably wasn't assisted by the fact that at the time Stonewall had some fairly, shall we say, no-nonsense campaigning lines around this in terms of trans rights, human rights, no debate.
Yeah.
Trans women are women, get over it.
And I think at a point when there was a lot of concern from those people who were worried that in some way increasing transgender rights would operate to diminish women's rights, there was concern about...
freedom of speech about there not being the opportunity to have open conversations about this.
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