Clamantis in Deserto?

Vox and the Brothers of Italy are both members of the European Conservatives and Reformists Party, which was founded by David Cameron to get himself out of a hole that he had dug. You should view them as you would him, and vice versa. The Conservative Party has nominally left the ECRP, but both the Young Conservatives and the Ulster Unionist Party are still in it, and it is hard to see who else is paying the bills. The German affiliate, for example, has all of 2000 members, and no elected representation at any level.

Within or beyond the ECRP, the supposedly populist European Right, which has once again proved to be not especially popular at all, has economic policies of the kind that Cameron pursued in coalition with the Liberal Democrats, and indeed the Lib Dems pursued in coalition with him. These things are written into the EU Treaties to which Santiago Abascal and Giorgia Meloni are as dedicated as George Osborne and Nick Clegg ever were. Therefore, they are also fully signed up to NATO, to its expansion to include Sweden and Finland, and to its war in Ukraine. There are exceptions, but that is what they are.

They all play the culture wars game, just as Rishi Sunak does, but they mean no more by it than he does. Who do his partisans think has been in government since 2010? The nearest approximation to a successful socially conservative movement in Britain in living memory has been organised against a Conservative Government by staunch feminists who are often lesbians and who are still as left-wing as they ever were, which in many or even most cases means very, very, very left-wing, indeed. They now have the sex industry, commercial surrogacy, and the sexualisation of children in their sights. Go, Sisters. What was it that some of us had been saying all along about capitalism?

Never believe anything that Keir Starmer says, but as of today, and in an extremely rare show of fidelity to one of Starmer's Leadership Election commitments, Labour does at least purport to be against gender self-identification. Unlike the Conservative Party, which is presiding over it day in and day out. Well, of course it is. The public sector has adopted gender self-identification as a consequence of privatisation, since it began as corporate policy, and the State now farms out so much of its activity that whatever the corporations want, then the State finds itself obliged to provide, if by no means necessarily unwillingly. Woke capitalism is the only possible form of either.

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. Bandwagoning columnists and broadcasters have their uses, but the full-time gender-critical writers and activists, who have been in from the start and who will be in after the bandwagon had moved on, are almost all at least broadly on 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, Bev Jackson, Kate Harris, Allison Bailey, Maya Forstater, Ruth Serwotka, Lisa McKenzie, Joan Smith, Beatrix Campbell, Victoria Smith, Linda Bellos (if you need to, then really do look her up), and so on.

Like several of those, Debbie Hayton is also an old school trade union activist. Laura Pidcock is catching hell for holding the line; we always knew that she was one of us on this as on Brexit, just as Daniel Kebede has never recanted his thoroughly sound views on either issue. Caroline Farrow's politics are closest to Blue Labour. Rod Liddle remains economically quite seriously left-wing. Paul Embery's published economic programme is to the left of either of Jeremy Corbyn's General Election manifestos. The name of George Galloway speaks for itself.

The 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. All 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 this change. Accordingly, a shift has long been discernible, and it is now practically complete. The Daily Mail has been there for ages, baldly calling Suzy Eddie Izzard "she" and what have you. If you want to avoid that sort of thing in a print newspaper, then buy the Morning Star.

Sunak is the fifth successive Prime Minister under whom gender self-identification has become the law for all practical purposes, without anything so vulgar as a parliamentary vote, and in the teeth of opposition from the Morning Star, Counterfire, Spiked, 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. Perhaps more than any other, this issue differentiates those who now organise in and through Counterfire from those who have remained in the SWP.

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.

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.