Economic Activity of Public Bodies; Overseas Matters

ITV is solely dependent on massive corporate advertising, so of course its idea of a "struggling mother" is a man. 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. The gender-critical writers 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, and so on. Like several of those, Debbie Hayton is also an old school trade union activist.

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.

Rishi 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, not least on another issue to which we shall shortly return.

I choose not to know how Mika Minio-Paluello purports to breastfeed, but I notice that his activities are of no interest to Social Services or to the safeguarding-industrial complex. Those also took no interest when a couple from the English village with the seventh highest house prices outside London moved their five British children to a warzone, where two of them have been killed, one while still only 15 years old.

That was purely a political choice on the part of the parents. They had not been displaced. They were not being persecuted. They could have lived anywhere between the River and the Sea if they had felt a religious obligation to do so. They made their children West Bank settlers, and two of them have died as a result. So much for Social Services. So much for the safeguarding-industrial complex. And so much for Prevent, which is likewise unmoved by the political ideology, not uncommonly violent, that is exemplified by Mr Minio-Paluello.

There are other teenagers and early twentysomethings on the West Bank, of course. The boys of the Jenin Brigades know that the Israelis made their families refugees. But they also know that the Palestinian Authority has a large share of culpability for the fact that they themselves were born that way, in a giant refugee camp that had been under Palestinian rule since before they were glints in the eye. With their purely homemade weapons, these extreme youths, in both senses, are no Iranian proxies. They have risen as much against Fatah, Hamas, and even Islamic Jihad, as they have against the Occupation. Next, head down the road to Nablus, and watch out for the Lions' Den.

With only 70 votes against, the House of Commons has this evening passed legislation that defined the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and even the Golan Heights, as parts of Israel, and made it illegal for anyone who happened to be a local councillor to criticise, not only any foreign state without central government permission, but Israel, thus defined, under any circumstance whatever. Labour abstained, because it wants these powers for itself, and because it has already made criticism of Israel, thus defined, expulsionable from the party.

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 Keir 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.