Conservative candidate and former MP calls out own party over trans rights: ‘Here we go again’
Elliot Colburn became an MP for Carshalton and Wallington in 2019. (Parliament)
Elliot Colburn, former MP and the Conservative candidate for Carshalton and Wallington, has called out the Conservative party for its views on transgender people despite once again running as a candidate for the party.
“We know what a woman is. Keir Starmer doesn’t,” the Conservatives’ official account posted on X, hitting out at the Labour Party leader.
This led to 31-year-old Colburn, who is gay, responding: “Here we go again, wondered how long it would take.”
Colburn is once again running as a Tory MP to retain his seat in Carshalton and Wallington but previously pleaded with this party to stop “demonising trans people”.
He will contest the seat against Labour’s Hersh Thaker, the Workers Party’s Mian Faisal Akbar, Reform UK’s Elizabeth Cooper, Liberal Democrats’ Bobby Dean, the Green Party’s Tracey Hague and the SDP’s Steve Kelleher.
In October, while speaking at the Conservative Party conference, Colburn said: “I want to make one thing perfectly clear to our Conservative colleagues. We will not win the next general election fighting with the LGBT+ community.”
Colburn also said that the people he meets while campaigning, who are “struggling with the most of living” and are worried about paying their bills and heating their homes, are not going to “forget” about those worries in favour of the Tories preventing “trans people playing sport”.
“The Conservative Party has come so far. We are the party that was responsible for Section 28. We have rightly apologised for that. We have tried so hard. David Cameron in particular tried to detoxify this party.”
“We have to drop this hardcore rhetoric and we have to drop it now,” Colburn added.
The Conservatives have been promoting their plans to alter the Equality Act today, promising that if they are re-elected, they will allow organisations to ban trans women from entering single-sex spaces and to only acknowledge biological sex rather than gender identity.
Despite the Tories tweeting that Labour’s Keir Starmer does not know what a woman is, the opposition leader has already condemned gender self-identification and ruled out allowing trans people to legally self identify their gender.
He previously told the BBC: “We don’t think that self-ID is the right way forward.”
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