So Let's Clear That One Up

"A woman is an adult female, so let's clear that one up," said Keir Starmer today. Welcome enough, if hardly from the most dependable of politicians, but what about the Government? It is presiding over gender self-identification day in and day out. The whole of the public sector and its vast network of contractors now simply presuppose it. This has happened entirely under the Conservatives, and without anything so vulgar as a Commons Division. How about one?

Interviewed by Paul Goodman in April, it took Rishi Sunak well over a minute to say that he believed in biological sex, "as a general, as a general, as a general kind of operating principle." But he has done nothing about even that. Gender self-identification has come to be treated as already the law only since 2015. Go back to 2010, and the concept itself was unheard of.

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?

They have a point that the views of young men are given priority over those of mature women. The question is which young men. My problem with Keir Mather is not his age, since in the early Corbyn years, I remember very young, very left-wing men who were totally sound on this and on Brexit, just as Jeremy Corbyn's own very old friends around Counterfire and the Morning Star were and are. They were no crypto-Greens, either. But Corbyn chose whoever it was that he chose instead, so here we are. And behind that was what is also behind the right-wing media's emerging choice of sides on, mark my words, all three of those matters. The old, old favourite. Class.

The writers on The Guardian do at least believe what they are saying. Unlike those on the right-wing papers. If you wanted a daily, print newspaper that supported Brexit, opposed gender self-identification, and was sceptical of Greenery, or even that managed to be any one of those things, then you will always have the Morning Star. Give it two years, and you will have nothing else. It would be less than a year, if the General Election were sooner. Suzanne Moore might become a columnist on the Morning Star, having started out on Marxism Today, the voice of the other side of the split between Eurocommunists and those who had continued to insist on the priority of class.

It was in Marxism Today that Moore's mentor, the late Professor Stuart Hall, first wrote of "Thatcherism", and this is where Thatcherism has inevitably ended up. Margaret Thatcher was last depicted on British television, for the first time in quite a while, in December's Prince Andrew: The Musical, the title of which spoke for itself, and in which she was played by one Baga Chipz, a drag queen. Well, of course. Gender self-identification is the inexorable logic of the self-made man or the self-made woman, and a figure comparable to Thatcher, emerging in the Britain of the 2020s, would be assumed to be a transwoman, just as Thatcher herself emerged in the Britain of everything from Danny La Rue and Dick Emery to David Bowie and The Rocky Horror Show. In a generation's time, everyone will be saying out loud that Tony Blair had always been as androgynous as Thatcher was. Leo Abse wrote eye-opening books on both of them.

Corresponding to Eurocommunism on the ancestrally Trotskyist side was the Pabloism that vaguely formed such politics as Starmer may be said to have. Starmer's previous view that a person with a penis might be a woman was wrong, but unlike Sunak's waffle, it was at least clear. As is Starmer's newfound reversion to the biological reality that he will have accepted as a basic fact of life until he was well into his fifties.

Not even full strength Pabloism would frighten Middle England if they knew about Starmer's background as some of us always have, since it is only the theoretical systematisation of their own opinions. Starmer is one of them to the core, and his so-called Red-Greenery would strike them as "moderate" and "centrist", if rather highfalutin in its articulation of what was "just common sense". It was fully compatible with the Trussonomics that, having even so much as pretended to oppose only one measure in the abandoned mini-Budget, Labour alone had been all ready to go into the next General Election continuing to advocate. It is fully compatible with whatever tax and spending plans the Conservatives may have at that Election, plans that Labour has promised to match without having seen them.

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.