Biologically Mail?

Here is the Daily Mail calling Suzy Eddie Izzard "she" and "her" throughout. Well, of course. From The Guardian to the Daily Telegraph, I defy anyone from abroad, who would not be able to do so by style rather than by substance, to tell the media of the liberal Right apart in a blind test. They all print what their corporate advertisers will pay for, based on what those corporations' market research has told them that the liberal-capitalist bourgeoisie wanted to read.

The 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. To the public sector and its vast network of contractors, gender self-identification is for all practical purposes already the law throughout the United Kingdom. That was not the case before 2015.

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 life of almost any right-wing hack. Anyone who doubts that has never met them.

Those newspapers have not given up on the restoration to the office of Prime Minister of the husband of Carrie "Stonewall" Johnson. Boris Johnson's reliable outrider, Michael Fabricant, has already called for the Gender Recognition Reform Bill to be extended throughout the United Kingdom. The question of gender self-identification would not even arise in a debate between Johnson and Keir Starmer. Or between Starmer and Rishi Sunak, come to that. On the Scottish Gender Recognition Reform Bill, Starmer's and Sunak's positions are exactly the same, namely that it should be done at United Kingdom level.

But when I tell you that there is going to be a hung Parliament, then you can take that to the bank. I spent the 2005 Parliament saying that it was psephologically impossible for the Heir to Blair's Conservative Party to win an overall majority. I predicted a hung Parliament on the day that the 2017 General Election was called, and I stuck to that, entirely alone, all the way up to the publication of the exit poll eight long weeks later. And on the day that Sunak became Prime Minister, I predicted that a General Election between him and Starmer would result in 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.