Pocket Money

I know of a charity that changes its logo every time that it goes bust. And so to yet another of Keir Starmer's resets. "Growth people can feel in their pockets," says Starmer as he promotes Darren Jones, who describes disability benefits as "pocket money".

Labour is a party of extremely right-wing people who lack the social connections to make it in the Conservative Party, and whose two defining experiences were being brought up to spit on everyone below them, which was everyone else where they grew up, and discovering in their first 36 hours at university that they were nowhere near the top of the class system, a discovery that embittered them for life.

Reform UK, is that the company that you wish to keep? Richard Tice's remarks about children with Special Educational Needs echo Jones, and the Government's plan to restrict or abolish EHCPs, and the mistreatment of Teaching Assistants by the former Labour Leadership of Durham County Council, which is now controlled by Reform.

As for the phrase "Growth people can feel in their pockets", it echoes Kenneth Williams and Hugh Paddick, and would therefore not be out of place in Weatherfield, Walford or Emmerdale. Like Oscar Wilde before him and Darren Star after him, Tony Warren created ostensibly female characters who were obviously splendid old queens. Coronation Street is only now "full of" gay men because that device is no longer used quite so much. Although there is still plenty of it on the cobbles and in the other locations for which that template was set.

Gay men have always run the soaps, and the old school could not stand bisexual men, but you can see the generational shift now that there are one in Coronation Street, one in EastEnders, and two in Emmerdale. Yet across all three, there is now only one transgender character, and that is a young woman who thinks that she is a young man.

Those of us who were born in the 1970s know for a fact about the dazzlingly racist primetime comedy while out and proud paedophiles were justifying themselves on the BBC and before parliamentary committees, but we still find those things hard to believe. In the 2070s, either people born in the present decade will know for a fact about gender identity but still find it hard to believe, or the "reproductive technology" that it will have engendered will have made it professionally, socially and perhaps legally impossible to have children the old-fashioned way, and possibly also to have sexual relations with anyone other than adult women and adolescent boys, prostituted from what was once the working class. We stand on the cusp.