Don't Go With The Flow

The great Dave Douglass is a vegan, so I have nothing against them. I am just never going to join their number. But fake meat is something else. Wanting to fake the pink juices of a rare steak strikes me as being of a piece with wanting to fake menstruation. Like fake lactation, fake menstruation now exists, although I strongly choose not to know how.

Like most of the Old Left, Dave is sound on gender self-identification. Tony Blair is of the same generation as many of the gender-critical feminists, and his political background is closer to theirs than you may think. Something similar is true of Keir Starmer, but more fool you if you believe a word that he tells you. He makes Blair look honest. And an unreliable shift in an Opposition party means nothing. Every day, and without anything so vulgar as a parliamentary vote, the Government continues to give effect to the logical outworking of the Thatcherite principle of the self-made man or the self-made woman. In 2010, there was no such concept as gender self-identification.

If this is a culture war, then where is the culture on our side? At 45, I had always assumed that we would win this one in my lifetime. But I am less and less certain. The other side enjoys the full force of the State and of a cultural sector that the State very largely funds. That double force was what turned England from, in 1530, an extravagantly Catholic country of many centuries' standing, to, by 1560, a country that would define itself as fundamentally anti-Catholic for the next 400 years. Again I say that that State is the Tory State, there having been no other for as long as the notion of gender self-identification has existed. There is no suggestion of a Government Bill or amendment to enact into law the rhetoric of Suella Braverman, or of Kemi Badenoch, or, almost but pointedly not quite, of Rishi Sunak.

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.