If we are going to hold the line against allowing 16-year-olds to self-identify as the opposite sex, then we need to hold the line against allowing them to vote. I have always been uncharacteristically agnostic about that one, but while the usual arguments on both sides are rubbish, this changes the game.
Intentionally or otherwise, the lowering of the voting age for devolved and municipal elections in Scotland set the scene for this. Gender self-identification must be refused Royal Assent, and the lowering of the voting age must be reversed.
The quality of the elections varies widely, but a formal voting age of 18 is very nearly universal. Consider the huge difference in, say, drinking ages, or ages of marriage. Yet the world looks at the question of when to allow people to vote, and overwhelmingly it concludes that, while these things were always going to be arbitrary, 18 would do.
The only notable exception has been the election of two of the last three Prime Ministers of the United Kingdom, the two to have been elected by anyone. There is no minimum age to join the Conservative Party, and even if anyone were checking, then voting rights would officially kick in at the age of 15.
Like foreign nationals, overseas residents, and incarcerated convicts, 15-year-olds have officially, and younger children have no doubt unofficially, voted for two of the last three Prime Ministers, who have in each case taken office immediately upon having been declared elected Party Leader while Parliament was not even sitting. If you are going to let the very young exercise that kind of power, then why not let them do anything else at all?
If we don't do this, no-one will. The Tory papers are already wavering, the only national paper still holding firm is the Morning Star.
ReplyDeleteWell, of course. All the media of the liberal Right, and from The Guardian to the Daily Telegraph I defy anyone to tell them apart in a blind test, print what their corporate advertisers will pay for, and what their market research tells them that the liberal-capitalist bourgeoisie wants to read.
DeleteThe first of those has in fact led the change on this issue, which is why that change has happened entirely under a Conservative Government, while the second has accordingly been changing so far and for so long that that can no longer be ignored.
It is well-known that a number of up-and-coming commentators, with aspirations to Conservative seats, have been disaffected for some time with the editorial line on gender self-identification. That line is now shifting. As always with anything that might be termed social conservatism, it never did bear the slightest resemblance to the private lives of almost any right-wing hack. Anyone who doubts that has never met them.
Marxism is an inadequate theoretical basis for the resistance to this, as it is for anything else. But it is better than Thatcherism, of which nothing could be a more perfect example than a literally self-made woman or self-made man. It is not the end. But at least it is a start.