Would the European Union admit an independent Scotland if it allowed a charge that carried a maximum sentence of life imprisonment to be tried by a single, salaried employee of the same State that brought the prosecution?
To the Victims, Witnesses and Justice Reform (Scotland) Bill, the British Government and its Official Opposition do not even have the purely constitutional objection that they have to the Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill. They would join in the automatic declaration that juryless trials had been a success in Scotland, and they would then extend them throughout the United Kingdom.
Therefore, it is necessary to appeal over their heads, and to authorities that in any case the Scottish National Party professed to respect, namely to practitioners in other Roman law jurisdictions, and to an EU that consisted almost entirely of such.
At least someone has to legislate for juryless trials, gender self-ID has just happened all over the UK since about 2015 without any vote on anywhere.
ReplyDeleteThe entire public sector and its vast network of contractors have come to treat gender self-identification as already the law entirely since a Conservative overall majority was returned in 2015. Go back to 2010, and the concept itself was unheard of.
DeleteAll of the right-wing media outlets are in internal turmoil over this issue, although none more so than the Daily Telegraph. Its contributors' columns have rarely borne any resemblance to their lifestyles, and the rising stars, the Conservative MPs and Ministers of the future, have been told in no uncertain terms that their careers inside the Conservative Party were being at least potentially frustrated by the line against gender self-identification. Accordingly, a shift is already discernible, and will soon enough be complete. The Daily Mail is already there, and simply calls Eddie Izzard "she". If you want to avoid this sort of thing in a print newspaper, then buy the Morning Star.
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 gender-critical writers, who 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.