Brothers, What Shall We Do?

The one per cent could be as diverse as it liked, but it would still be the one per cent. It is far harder to define a white person or an upper-middle-class person than it is to define a woman, yet no one needed to go to court to ensure that only upper-middle-class, white people would be appointed to public positions. That was a given, and it remains so.

My teeth have ground almost to nought at the descriptions of Millicent Fawcett as a "Suffragette". If those making that error know nothing about her, then it was hardly surprising that nor did those who marked their territory by passing water on her statue, thereby negating their own argument that they needed access to the ladies'.

But they had presumably heard of Nelson Mandela, whose statue they also defaced. As well they might have done. In every way, they were the heirs of the two most androgynous leading politicians in British history, Margaret Thatcher who called Mandela a terrorist and whose flame-keepers say to this day that he should have been hanged, and Tony Blair who comically thought that he was cutting off Mandela, rather than the other way round, over the Iraq War.

Why were the vandals not arrested? Why are the Police appealing for information about events in broad daylight, in the most surveilled area of the most surveilled city, certainly in Britain, and possibly in the world? But it is not difficult to see why they were making the most fuss about this rather than about anything else. The last Government made that the more serious offence, a measure that the present governing party did not oppose and has never suggested that it would repeal.

Public urination was also a feature of last year's race riots. I am the first to say that Lucy Connolly and Julie Sweeney got what they deserved, although Sweeney must be due out about now, so I hope that the same will be meted out to those whose placards called for the murder of "TERFs", for the return of witch-burning in order to deal with J.K. Rowling, and for her straight murder without even so much as a witch trial, while professing, alongside a drawing of a gallows and a noose, that, "The only good TERF is a dead TERF." I am no stranger to demonstrations, and I have never seen the like.

Nor have I ever heard anything like those speeches. I remember when Tony Benn tore a strip off Ali G for "calling women bitches", and as Benn later conceded, that was supposed to have been a joke. This was not. If it were let go, then David Lammy, who branded "dinosaurs" those who denied that hormonal treatment could enable a man to grow a cervix, would be in a position almost as invidious as preparing to vote for a Bill to render impossible any attempt to revive the sentencing guidelines that he had proposed to the last Conservative Government. However many tiers there are, Lammy is at the very bottom, where Marie Antoinette won the Nobel Prize for Physics, Henry VII succeeded Henry VIII, Red Leicester is the blue cheese served with port, and speculation as to whether the smoke from the Sistine Chapel would be black or white is "silly innuendo about the race of the next Pope".

Whether or not the United Kingdom ought to have a Supreme Court, it made no new law here. It simply said what the law had always been. There does have to be a final court of appeal, and this time it acted as nothing more, nor less, than that. The statute that it interpreted was the Equality Act 2010, because all the way up to the very last days of the last Labour Government, "What is a woman?" was not a question. Indeed, Saturday's protesters made it clear that what they felt was being reversed were "10 years" of, as they saw it, "progress".

In other words, the whole thing began only in the year that the Conservatives attained an overall majority in the House of Commons for the first time in 18 years, but five years into a Conservative Premiership. From that point, David Cameron was openly highly supportive of their cause. As Prime Minister, Theresa May always was. Boris Johnson always had been. While Johnson was Prime Minister, Liz Truss proudly lowered to five pounds the fee for a Gender Recognition Certificate. If the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Equalities, Kemi Badenoch, raised any objection, then there is no record of it. A few weeks later, Johnson made her Minister of State for the same portfolio. Nor does anyone recall a peep out of Rishi Sunak. When Badenoch and Bridget Phillipson laid into each other's records this afternoon, then they were both right.

The right-wing media were likewise either silent because they saw themselves as having no side, or not uncommonly actively in favour. After all, men and women could be self-made, could they not? It was only when former Guardian writers were employed elsewhere for purely and legitimately commercial reasons that their new employers adopted a more critical stance, or at least permitted it to be expressed. Many stalwarts were and are unhappy at the change. Like Conservative MPs, right-wing hacks routinely have the remarkable private lives that liberals merely advocated from a state of domestic mundanity.

There have been good career moves all round. Gentlemen, are you tired of being only moderately successful actors or comedians? Then declare yourselves transwomen, and feel your careers hurtle into the stratosphere. Ladies, do you fancy a bit more prominence than you had attained through academia or the worthier sorts of journalism? Then make names for yourselves as gender-critical feminists, and watch the new platforms build themselves. Notice that the latter rarely use those platforms to advance economic equality or international peace. In what way are they still left-wing? In what way were some of them ever?

The same is true in the present Government. When it is not ordering schools to show a drama that warned teenage girls that the bookish boys who were no good at football were liable to kill them, and when it is not using that as an excuse to ban teenagers from accessing alternatives to centrism, then it includes as Ministers people who were openly resisting the Supreme Court, the kind of thing that is not unreasonably likened, and more than likened, to Fascism when it is done by Donald Trump. Those are the Gay Grandees, whether in the persons of Dame Angela Eagle and Sir Chris Bryant, or by proxy through Steve Race, protégé of Sir Ben Bradshaw. They did not approve of such disregard of the Court in the Brexit days, even if it did deliver the verdict that Benn, Barbara Castle, Peter Shore or Michael Foot would have delivered on the principle of the proroguing of Parliament.

Contrast the Gay Grandees with David Cullinane, for all his forced non-retraction retraction, and with Pádraig Mac Lochlainn, respectively Sinn Féin's health spokesman and its Chief Whip in the Dáil. Mac Lochlainn has called for "the debate to be had" in Ireland in response to the British ruling that Cullinane has described as "common sense". Sinn Féin now faces being banned from Pride in Dublin, as it already has been in Belfast because of its own ban on puberty blockers. Even Sinn Féin should be proud of that.

Prouder than Reform UK, in fact, which is courting Truss. There is no sensible question to which the correct answer is "Liz Truss". Whatever else Nigel Farage may be, he has hitherto been an astute political tactician. What is he thinking? And what does this tell us about his and his party's true positions? Truss made it possible, or so she thought, for a man to declare himself a woman for a fiver, and then she was the Foreign Secretary for Johnson's adventure in Ukraine.

The same may be said of anyone who gave houseroom to Douglas Murray, and of the Homeland Party, and therefore also of the Patriotic Alternative to which it is still closely connected, with its invitation to Renaud Camus. Camus wants a European Army with Ukraine in it. When he says patrie, then that is what he means. When his British fanboys say Homeland, then that is what they mean.

No less than Murray, Camus also approves of the IDF's violence against Palestinian Christians at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem on Holy Saturday, and of the arrest and detention at Heathrow for eight hours on Good Friday, in front of his eight-year-old son, of the Palestinian Christian Cambridge academic and British citizen Professor Makram Khoury-Machool, under the Terrorism Act's infamous section 7, which does not require the Police or Immigration Officers to suspect anything at all.

In today's Epistle, Saint Peter's preaching in Jerusalem adds about three thousand souls to the Church. This is how Keir Starmer wants their descendants to be treated. And those who bang on about "Christian heritage" and whatnot agree with him. Centrism and right-wing populism are con tricks to sell exactly the same economic and foreign policies to different audiences by pretending to wage a culture war, if that in either Murray's or Renaud's case. Fascism is inherent in both of them, and it never arises except by their joint enterprise.