In A Twist?

Carrie Johnson's husband's reliable outrider, Michael Fabricant, has called for the Scottish Gender Recognition Reform Bill to be extended to England. Nothing could be more Thatcherite than a literally self-made woman or a literally self-made man, as many a once Marxist, still basically dialectical materialist feminist now argues in right-wing papers and on right-wing websites, thereby demonstrating that those outlets could find no one in their own tribe to make the heavyweight case against gender self-identification. Catholic orthodoxy could and does make that case, and it makes it better than Marxism does, but neither the relativistic antinomianism of the public school Church of England, nor its Brideshead Catholic imitation on and around the Daily Telegraph, has anything approaching the necessary resources.

The line is being held valiantly in the Morning Star, on Counterfire, and on a Spiked that the strikes have driven back to its roots. It is fundamental to the Alba Party, which has two MPs and which is well to the left of the SNP on economic and foreign policy. Soundness on it is so central to George Galloway's continuation in public life that it is also fundamental to the Workers Party of Britain, which has already taken 22 per cent of the vote and come third at a by-election to the House of Commons; no party to the right of the Conservatives has done anything comparable to that in quite some time.

Since Chris Williamson joined the Socialist Labour Party, then it and the Workers Party have been cooperating more and more closely, since they both reject the pursuit of identity politics over class politics, and the denial of material reality. That is also the view of the exponentially increasing membership of the Communist Party of Britain, which is mostly among working-class youth, and for whom the rejection of gender ideology is, with the embrace of Brexit, one of the two key wedge issues, although the strikes are rapidly becoming a third one. We may well be coming to the end of the CPB's long history of advocating a vote for the Labour Party under almost all circumstances. And so on.

Even the SDP is economically far more left-wing than either main party in England, or than any main party in Scotland. Rod Liddle, who flies the flag for biological sex across three Fleet Street titles, is an active member of the SDP. For all its faults, The Observer proves that it really is different from The Guardian by taking an editorial line against the Gender Recognition Reform Bill, and by publishing something gender critical at least every other week or so, usually, though by no means exclusively, by Sonia Sodha. Gender critical feminists who sought berths beyond the Guardian Media Group were not doing anything wrong in escaping personal grievances and in accepting the offer of more money, but that was what they were doing. While the Morning Star, Counterfire, Spiked, the Alba Party, the Workers Party, the SLP, the CPB and the SDP all have their decided imperfections, they are all much more reliable on Brexit than any main party is, and they are almost all either broadly or completely sound on energy policy.

By contrast, the Government is still angling to re-join the Single Market and the Customs Union, and it remains devoted to net zero. The Prime Minister whose wife gave us that latter may well be back in office very soon, and one of his most reliable outriders has called for the Scottish Gender Recognition Reform Bill to be extended to England, which no one currently in office has ruled out. They are "taking a look at it" in Scotland, or something. They are going to do nothing against it, or they would have done it by now. They are far more likely to enact the same thing in England, as only the DUP stopped them from doing half a decade ago. Who needs Keir Starmer?

Thankfully, we are heading for a hung Parliament. To strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty, we need to hold the balance of power. Owing nothing to either main party, we must be open to the better offer. There does, however, need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not.