Yvette Cooper, shadow Secretary of state for the Home Office and shadow minister for Women and Equalities made a bit of a faux pas yesterday. She wrote an opinion piece for Pink News – which I agree with the ideas behind, even if I’m suspicious of the motives – calling on the government to introduce more marriage equality by allowing same-sex religious marriage.

Unfortunately, it seems she’s not that well-informed on LGBT issues and neither are whichever Labour HQ staff proofread the piece. Badly informed enough not to know what the T in LGBT stands for in fact.

Here’s what one paragraph near the end initially included…

We know there are other prejudices many who are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transvestite still face from homophobic bullying in school, to discrimination at work.

Oops.

The line was rapidly corrected to say “transgender”, with Pink News blaming the error on a “typo in the original copy”. But this is Labour’s second error in a week, the first Ken’s London mayoral manifesto making errors on healthcare comissioning.

I do not regard this development as a good thing. Effective government requires effective opposition and it’s harder to push a topic when the opposition are floundering.