Champion?

The BBC may have withdrawn from Stonewall's Diversity Champions Programme, but numerous branches of the actual Government remain signed up to it.

Gender self-identification has arisen under the Conservatives; it was almost unheard of even under the Coalition, never mind as long ago as the Brown Government.

It is Thatcherism to the utmost, according to which a woman, or a man, can literally be self-made. And the Conservatives have made it the de facto law of the land without anything like a parliamentary vote.

As they did with Gillick competence, in fact. There has never been a parliamentary vote on Margaret Thatcher's hard-fought abolition of the age of consent, either. The two are not unconnected.

Of course, the Conservatives talk a good fight for the other side. They have been doing that forever. "Political Correctness" arose entirely in the Thatcher years.

Either she was powerless to stop it, in which case what was the point of her? Or this was the inevitable and intended consequence of a shift from an economy based on making real things, to an economy based on numbers on a screen.

There would have been none of this if the miners had won. But they didn't. There will always be someone, somewhere who defended the destruction of the British coal industry. Anyone who still held that view next spring would be beyond help.

Meanwhile, as if to prove that no party was all bad, the Conservative Government, with local Labour and Liberal Democrat support, is preparing to open a new pit. It will not and must not be the last.

The miners were right. Of course they were. And how ecofeminist would Britain have become if they had won? For that, you need the (awful word) "woke" financial giants created by Thatcherism.