Title of Honour

26 Lords Spiritual, three reserved seats for Liberal Democrat hereditary peers, and two for Labour ones, mean that at least 31 seats in our legislature are set aside for institutions or organisations that deny the fact of biological sex. Arguably, the 42 seats that are reserved for Conservative hereditary peers take that figure up to 73. Yet most hereditary peerages cannot be inherited by women, and Section 16 the Gender Recognition Act specifically provides that the acquisition of a new gender under that Act "does not affect the descent of any peerage or dignity or title of honour".

Moreover, in 2015, when the Church of England decided to have women bishops in order to retain its parliamentary seats, then it was resolved that the seniority principle would be suspended until 2025, such that every woman appointed as a diocesan bishop would automatically be appointed as a Lord Spiritual at the next vacancy. A brief wait would instead have enabled half the male bishops to have self-identified as women. Their immutable biological sex would have been what had mattered to traditional Anglo-Catholics and to Conservative Evangelicals, neither of whom are in any case particularly numerous in the Church of England, and all the trouble would presumably have been averted.

What a thing it is to have the Magisterium. If not the next tranche of our own bishops, then the one after that, will be dominated by Soft Left soft traditionalists who will need those of who had been conceived to be prophets rather than kings to hold unflinchingly to Catholic orthodoxy as the only sure foundation of the struggle for economic equality and for international peace, and to that struggle as the praxis of that orthodoxy in the midst of everything the birth pangs of which we are experiencing as the death throes of the present age.

To be a theological liberal is to be a political liberal, and thus trapped in everything that is collapsing around our ears. It is to be a Catholicised Biden rather than a Catholicised Sanders, a Catholicised Starmer rather than a Catholicised Corbyn, a Catholicised Macron rather than a Catholicised Mélenchon. That way lies Fascism. In the second round of the recent French parliamentary elections, where supporters of Emmanuel Macron had been eliminated in the first round, then a mere 16 per cent of their voters switched to the candidates endorsed by Jean-Luc Mélenchon. 72 per cent abstained rather than vote against the partisans of Marine Le Pen, while another 12 per cent voted for them.

It therefore came as no surprise when Macron's supporters gave two of the six Vice-Presidencies of the National Assembly to Le Pen's. In my day, and no doubt still, A-level History students used to have to unlearn the GCSE fiction that Nazism had been a working-class phenomenon. Nor is Fascism a product of traditional conservatism, whatever alliances it may forge, or whatever symbolism it may adopt. Rather, the liberal bourgeoisie keeps Fascism in reserve for when it might ever face any serious demand to share its economic or social power with anyone who did not have it before the rise of the bourgeois liberal order, or to share its cultural or political power with anyone at all. Consider the growing authoritarianism of Justin Trudeau's Canada. Consider the tendencies of Joe Biden and Liz Truss. Consider the records of Kamala Harris and Keir Starmer. Consider to whom and to what Mario Draghi looks set to cede. Such is the Franco-American republican tradition that arose from the international transmission of English Whiggery through the Masonic Lodges.

As in the Church, so on the Left. The Corbyn Project has bifurcated, and the authorised public voice is that of those who would compromise with the European Union, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, the World Trade Organisation, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the anti-industrial Malthusianism and misanthropy of the Green agenda, the treatment of identity politics as equal or superior to class politics, the treatment of gender identity as equal or superior to biological sex, the cancel culture of which our people have always been the principal victims, the erosion of civil liberties, the stupefaction of the workers and the youth, the indulgence of separatist tendencies in parts of Great Britain, and the failure to recognise that a sovereign state with its own free floating, fiat currency had as much of that currency as it chose to issue to itself, with readily available fiscal and monetary means of controlling any inflationary effect, means that therefore needed to be under democratic political control.

Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi, who is a true heroine of the fight against the hoax and scam that has been exposed by the Forde Report, remains a candidate for the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party, and she remains one of the five candidates who are endorsed by the Campaign for Socialism, Jewish Voice for Labour, Kashmiris for Labour, Labour Assembly Against Austerity, Labour Black Socialists, Labour Briefing (Co-op), Labour CND, the Labour Representation Committee, Labour Women Leading, Northern England Labour Left, Red Labour, Welsh Labour Grassroots, and the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy. However, unlike the other four, she is no longer endorsed by Momentum, because she will not subscribe to gender self-identification. Expect a lot more of this.

Feelings are real, but they are not facts. As poverty of aspiration is a real feeling, but it is economic inequality that is a fact, so gender identity is a real feeling, but it is biological sex that is a fact. Those who failed to hold the first line, but who instead followed Marxism Today in whoring after Neil Kinnock and Tony Blair, are now unable to hold the second line, either. And those who are failing to hold the second line will be unable to hold the first, no matter how devoted they might have been to the person or cause of Jeremy Corbyn.

Without a robust material realism, there can be no pursuit of economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, led by those who suffered most as a result of economic inequality, namely the working class, and led by those who suffered most as a result of international conflict, namely the working class and the youth. Yet most of the Left has succumbed to gender self-identification, which is a flat denial of even the most blatantly obvious material reality. Demonstrably, then, dialectical materialism has failed to provide that robust basis. Nor, in itself, can natural science, which cannot prove the ontological existence of material reality, but rather presupposes it and works from there.

What is needed is Thomism, which by definition exists within the wider Augustinian tradition. Fundamental to both is absolute fidelity to the Roman Magisterium, which is itself irrevocably committed to the Thomist metaphysical system, within which its own indispensable role precludes any degeneration comparable to that of the ancestrally Marxian Left into gender self-identification. Philosophy needs the Rock of the Petrine Office no less than Theology does. Just as there can be no meaningful claim to be pro-life without an active commitment to economic equality and to international peace, so there can be no such commitment without material realism. There can be no secure material realism, nor, therefore, any science, without Thomism. And there can be no Thomism without the Roman Obedience, which one adopts either entirely and at whatever cost, or not at all.

Applied to the present and future situations, this has implications that are vastly more egalitarian economically, vastly more pacific internationally, and vastly more democratic politically, than anything that Marxism could ever devise, much less deliver. This is not to build the house from the roof down. Fidelity to the Magisterium requires Thomism, which entails material realism, which compels a critique of the present and future economic and geopolitical order such as leads inexorably to the pursuit of equality and peace through democracy.

Be in no doubt that we are the future, one way or another. 50 years' time is the very latest that I might remotely realistically be alive. Here in Britain, for example, either we shall have won by then, or we shall have been driven underground or into exile, those of us who were not in prison or martyred. And 50 years after that, and 50 years after that again, and so on until we had prevailed.