The Daily Male No More

Parliament Square has caught up with something that I have been saying for the better part of a year: 

The Daily Mail is of course a byword for right-wing evil. In their excellent satire on modern panel shows, Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse offered a string of forgettable comedians uttering the immortal punchline “Oh my God, the Daily Mail” as if their audience should fall about at the very reference.

Of course, this image hasn’t come from nowhere. Richard Littlejohn isn’t going to get a gig at The Guardian anytime soon. Yet read some of MailOnline’s stories about gender issues, for example, and you could be forgiven for getting the sense, “Is this not a bit — right on?”

A report on a convicted attempted murderer cum trans activist who encouraged people to punch “TERFs”, for example, scrupulously uses she/her pronouns — not what someone might expect from a den of far right iniquity.

So keen is the Mail on using politically correct pronouns, in fact, that gender critical feminists who have written for the platform have complained that they have been imposed upon their work.

But more vivid evidence comes in MailOnline’s obsessive coverage of Eddie Izzard. “Suzy”, as the Mail calls the transgender comedian, is always being followed by prurient paparazzi and the Mail can’t get enough.

“Suzy Eddie Izzard sports a floral dress and red lipstick as she enjoys a night out,” the Mail reported (if “reported” isn’t too noble a word) last month. “She” looked “blooming lovely” in the “floral flock” the Mail gushed. The day before, Izzard “looked fab in a bright pink mini skirt teamed with a figure-hugging black top,” the Mail claimed. “She added mint green heels and a slick of red lipstick to even complete the glam look as she enjoyed dinner with friends.”

In yet another article, Izzard “puts on a leggy display in denim hotpants”. “Suzy appeared to be in great spirits as she enjoyed the sights of London in the sunshine”. It’s a wonder that being in great spirits was possible with the ever-present camera butting in.

What the hell is going on?

Well, we know the biggest motivator behind MailOnline: “here comes the moneeeey”. MailOnline would welcome clicks from the Workers’ Party of Korea if it would drive advertising revenue. Parliament Square has no wish to imply that its click-hungry celeb-hunting is good journalism even when it doesn’t have the air of right-on virtue signalling.

But it does have that air. Parliament Square couldn’t help wondering if this progressive tone represented an attempt to double dip: attracting clicks from woke Eddie Izzard fans and annoyed gender critical feminists. That would be amoral but at least it would be clever.

Yet perhaps there is a more parsimonious explanation. Your idea of the average Mail journalist might be a leering, cigarette smoke-smelling middle-aged oddball drooling over a pint of beer. But in fact each of these articles about Eddie Izzard was written by a different female journalist with a background in entertainment media — past experience including Maximum Pop, HELLO! magazine and the Mirror.

Perhaps MailOnline doesn’t seem right-on by accident but because it is. That’s depressing for those of us who are evil right-wingers to contemplate but it might be the case.

Oh my God, the Daily Mail.

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. As set out above, the Daily Mail has been there for ages. 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, the fiercely pro-EU British branch of the Shachtmanism that produced the neoconservative movement. It does not play well with others on the Left.

And 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 Rishi 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.