A Proper Public Orientation?

This is interesting and important, several parts of it are correct even if several others are dreadful, and there are good people among the signatories. The question is which of the five keynote speakers at this month's National Conservatism Conference would be able to sign it. To say nothing of numerous others who were to address that assembly.

Two of those keynote speakers are in the Cabinet, as one of them has been almost continuously since 2010. The Edmund Burke Foundation's previous events have not attracted speakers at the very heart of government in the countries in which they have been held.

Eastern European leaders have featured in Rome and Brussels, and one of the Rome speakers is now the Prime Minister of Italy, so watch how many of these agenda she delivered. But with both Suella Braverman and Michael Gove given star billing in London, Britain must be the beating heart of National Conservatism.

Yet read that Statement of Principles, and tell me how it resembled the Britain that was governed by Braverman and Gove. If this event were remotely what it claimed to be, then far from having any member of this Government even in the audience, the names of the most prominent Cabinet Ministers would be ritually booed.

For example, Rishi Sunak is 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. It is more entrenched here than anywhere else. Sunak has purely a constitutional objection to the Scottish Gender Recognition Reform Bill.

Until the likeminded Keir Starmer's opportunistic intervention, the Government had been planning only to disapply Scottish Gender Recognition Certificates in the rest of the United Kingdom. Alister Jack still says explicitly that he would consider a rewritten Gender Recognition Reform Bill. It would be quicker to count the opponents than the supporters of gender self-identification in the Cabinet. The right-wing papers are also shifting on this, in line with corporate advertiser requirements, Middle English opinion, and the views of rising contributors. Of course, those three are intimately connected.

The Conservative and Labour frontbenches at Westminster and Holyrood, where a Conservative free vote saw two frontbenchers and a former Leader vote in favour, will come up with a "compromise" such as Starmer had outlined, and present that as the "sensible" option, by and for "the adults in the room". As such, it would obviously have to be given effect throughout the United Kingdom. Such is the heartland of National Conservatism. "The traditional family is the source of society's virtues and deserves greater support from public policy," indeed.

By the way, and as asked in a comment on a recent post, while Marianne Williamson's position is exactly as one would expect, what does Robert F. Kennedy Jr. think of gender self-identification? How does Starmer propose to give boys special classes in how to respect women, when he cannot say, either who is a boy, or who is a woman?

Apparently the most National Conservative Government in the world, the United Kingdom's has no intention of issuing a section 35 order against the Victims, Witnesses and Justice Reform (Scotland) Bill, and indeed could not do so with any credibility when it had just reauthorised the use of Diplock courts in Northern Ireland.

Yet it is of the utmost concern to those of us in the rest of the United Kingdom that offences carrying potential sentences of life imprisonment are to be tried by a salaried State employee sitting alone, under orders to meet the State's target conviction rate, which is clearly 100 per cent. As, of course, it would be, since the State brings the prosecution. What do legal practitioners in other Roman law jurisdictions make of this proposed change in Scotland? Which other countries would grant orders to extradite to such a regime?

And would these judges subscribe, as the one who jailed Craig Murray did, to Kamm's Law, which effectively exempts employees of the official media companies from, well, pretty much any law that applied to the rest of us? As long as you are a paid "journalist", then it turns out that, for example, you cannot be charged with criminal harassment. That really is the law. Wangle a Fleet Street gig at a dinner party, and you can say anything you like about anyone, even in print and online.

State that they had faked a distinguished signature on a round-robin letter about a major political issue. Accuse them of having called for someone to be murdered. Claim that they had been found to have made a false accusation of child abuse. Damage their employment prospects by falsely claiming that, in their mid-forties, they had never worked. Bang on endlessly about their elderly, widowed mother. Propagate the fantasy that the conveniently dead had banned them from somewhere or other for sexual harassment. And much more besides.

That is before mentioning the Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Act, the Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Act, the Elections Act, or the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act, along with vaccine passports, the Public Order Bill, the Online Safety Bill, the National Security Bill, the persecution of Julian Assange, and the power of the Home Secretary to strip people of their British citizenship, now without even having to tell them. The Home Secretary is a keynote speaker at the National Conservatism Conference. This is National Conservatism. It is no wonder that Peter Hitchens is conspicuously absent from it.

Starmer is of course a supporter of gender self-identification so long as it were enacted at Westminster rather than at Holyrood. His close ally, Anas Sarwar, will probably not oppose the Victims, Witnesses and Justice Reform (Scotland) Bill, and would certainly not suggest repealing it. Starmer is signed up to Kamm's Law, no doubt implicitly. He has been a key figure in the torture of Assange. He has rarely opposed any of the measures in the paragraph immediately before this one, and he would leave them all in place. He is so like Gove that if Gove is a National Conservative, then so is Starmer.

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.