You must be in favour of same-sex marriage, which the Blair Government repeatedly ruled out on the floor of both Houses, but you must not be, or at least you need not necessarily be, in favour of gender self-identification, a concept that did not exist in those days.
And you may oppose assisted suicide, at least on balance, but you have to be in favour of abortion on demand at every stage of pregnancy. The latter would have been too bad for John Smith, Charles Kennedy or Christopher Hitchens, but fine by Margaret Thatcher.
If in doubt, Sonia Sodha.
The argument is that same-sex marriage, and the abortion up to birth that was one of Thatcher's last acts as Prime Minister, are already the law, whereas gender self-identification, and assisted suicide, are not. I would have no interest in repealing same-sex marriage, nor do I know of anyone, including Kate Forbes, who would. But how does one begin to construct an answer to the argument that all that matters is that something happens to be the law at this moment in time?
Blairism never was intellectually coherent.
ReplyDeleteAnd its fag end today was even worse than it was in its heyday.
DeleteForbes v Regan v Yusuf, I can hear dreams dying all over the place.
ReplyDeleteSo can they.
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