Posie Politics?

I have no idea why Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull, as she would have to call herself on the ballot paper, would want to contest Keir Starmer's seat, especially when a serious Left campaign already has five thousand supporters since Tuesday, and an office. Yes, a real, actual, physical office, right there in the constituency. I know that for a fact. Watch out for the announcement of the candidate.

"Posie Parker" would do better to be standing against Rishi Sunak, the fifth successive Prime Minister under whom gender self-identification has become the law for all practical purposes across the public sector and its vast network of contractors, without anything so vulgar as a parliamentary vote, and in the teeth of opposition from the Morning Star, Counterfire, the Socialist Labour Party, the Communist Party of Britain, and so on, with both Alba and the Workers Party of Britain having been founded in so small part because of this issue. The CPB, the WPB and Alba are all growing especially rapidly, while of course Labour Party and SNP membership are both in free fall.

Of those listed, only Alba is iffy on Brexit; it wants an independent Scotland to be in EFTA. All of the others have been opposed to the EU forever, since Margaret Thatcher and Norman Tebbit were calling that position "Loony Left". Again, both Socialist Labour and the Workers Party have in no small measure been founded on this question. If there is a Left party in favour of gender self-identification, then it is the Alliance for Workers' Liberty, which is the fiercely pro-EU British branch of the Shachtmanism that produced the neoconservative movement. It does not play well with others on the Left.

One who does, however,  is my near neighbour, Daniel Kebede. Right on gender self-identification, right on Brexit, right on Ukraine, and right on economics, including the increasingly successful strikes, he is still only in his mid-thirties, he is no longer in the Labour Party, and today he was elected General Secretary of the National Education Union. A luta continua.

It continues in the pages of the right-wing papers, and on websites such as UnHerd and The Critic. Notice that apart from Sarah Vine, who concedes her debt to the left-wing sisters, the gender critics there are almost all at least broadly from the Left, and in many cases very strongly so. Julie Bindel, Kathleen Stock, Suzanne Moore, Julie Burchill, Sarah Ditum, Helen Joyce, Jo Bartosch, Lucy Masoud, Selina Todd, and so it goes on. Like several of those, Debbie Hayton is also an old school trade union activist. In any case, the right-wing papers are not going to be publishing these views in the near future, since their younger contributors, Conservative MPs and Ministers of the next 15 to 20 years, are sick of the potential damage to their careers.

The public sector has adopted gender self-identification as a consequence of privatisation, since it began as corporate policy, and the State now farms so much out that whatever the corporations want, then the State finds itself obliged to provide, if by no means necessarily unwillingly. Anyone who cannot see that gender self-identification is the logical consequence of the Thatcherite concept of a self-made man or a self-made woman is a caricature of a Tory anti-intellectual, who has simply never read anything, or even given anything any thought. Including many an article by the aforesaid gender-critical writers.

At the top of the Conservative Party, they can and do see that logic. That is why gender self-identification has happened entirely while they have been in office. That is also why it has become dominant in the Labour Party only under Starmer rather than under Jeremy Corbyn, who was conflicted on this as on many things, but who was especially close to the Morning Star and Counterfire sets. Sunak and Starmer are at one on the Scottish Gender Recognition Reform Bill, not that it is wrong at principle, but that it should be enacted at Westminster.

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.