Privacy, Dignity and Safety

I cannot bring myself to write the word that even Radio Four uses for "lavatory". The lack of such public provision is an issue in itself, to be addressed at least as urgently as the proliferation of gender-neutral facilities where they exist at all. Yet Kemi Badenoch clearly feels that there would be fewer votes in that for Leader of the Conservative Party. Considering the age of its members, is she quite sure?

As Isabel Hardman puts it: "Everyone involved agrees that the gender-critical movement in politics was slow to get going, and didn’t notice the many changes to policy that ministers, public agencies and other organisations were agreeing to without much public fuss – until it almost seemed too late. In the past couple of years, activists have gone into a frenzy of organising to try to catch up and change party and government policy. As [Baroness] Jenkin says, it was easier in the Conservatives, if only because senior figures, including Sunak, saw the topic as a way of undermining Starmer. But the real prize was Labour party policy, because the debate is still largely happening on the left, not in the Tory party."

Yes, but the Left is not in government. Even defining it so expansively as to include the Labour Party before and after the Corbyn Leadership, it has not been in government while the concept of gender self-identification has existed. No one had heard of such a suggestion in 2010. 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.

If this is a culture war, then where is the culture on our side? When I last asked that, then it elicited this comment: "Exactly. Transgender people are half of one per cent of the population but they are characters in everything especially about teenagers. There are stereotypical middle age blokey bigots but nobody ever says anything gender critical and women are always onside." Certainly within 14 hours, although it had probably taken nowhere near that long, that comment had disappeared, leaving only my reply, "I wish that I knew how to counteract all of this. All ideas depend on funding to which we have no possible access." Indeed, we have not. In Tory Britain, we cannot even give voice to the need. Truly, we are the Recusants now.

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 give statutory effect to Badenoch's rhetoric, which is pointedly never quite echoed by 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 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.