Cuts All Round

A fairly hysterical regular, and sometimes even permitted, poster of attempted comments on here is both a Peter Hitchens cultist and a fanatical UKIP supporter, positions that are in fact mutually incompatible. His latest screech, echoing Godfrey Bloom (who was torn apart for it by Peter Hitchens on his blog), is that the cuts do not exist.

That will come as news in the Northern towns "represented" by Bloom and apparently being courted by UKIP. As it will come as news in the areas of the 120 rural councils that are in revolt against, overwhelmingly, a Prime Minister and a Chancellor of the same party as themselves. Before we even mention the withdrawal of Child Benefit from the upper middle classes. From the Northern towns, to the rolling countryside, to the haute bourgeois citadels of the semi-suburban South East, if UKIP doesn't want you...

But then, cuts seem to be the big news all round today. Understandably, since feminism began and has therefore always defined this kind of debate, the concentration is on the views of Suzanne Moore and Julie Burchill where transsexualism is concerned. As it also is from time to time on the views of Julie Bindel, valiant scourge of the "free" market otherwise known as the sex industry since you cannot have one without the other, and insightful, civil-partnered critic of same-sex "marriage" in this week's Spectator.

However, whatever might be between the legs of, to use the preferred terminology, a female-to-male transsexual, it is not what I have. It cannot do what mine does. I was born with mine, because I was born and I will die with a Y chromosome in every cell of my body, inherited from my father, and from his father, and on back forever. Without a Y chromosome, you are not a man. You are just not. And aren't we all supposed to be totally opposed to female genital mutilation? I certainly am, just as I am to male genital mutilation. New birth certificates are State lying, as if we did not already have more than enough of that.

You can wear whatever you like, but it is what is underneath that matters. You can cut up the tissue in any way that you please, but the chromosomes do not and cannot change. Neither dressing up nor revelling in, and yet in some way simultaneously trying to deny, cuts can ever make you a man. Likewise, neither dressing up nor revelling in, and yet in some way simultaneously trying to deny, cuts can ever make Thatcherism In Exile into an authentically conservative force.

Rather, that must defend and, where necessary, restore the State action necessary in order to maintain the work of charities and of churches, the State action necessary in order to maintain viable and vibrant rural communities, the State action necessary in order to maintain stable families, and the State action necessary in order to maintain a large and thriving middle class. With public money come public responsibilities, including public accountability for how those responsibilities are, or are not, being met.