Rumbling On

Caroline Dinenage has brought the Parliament of the United Kingdom into international disrepute. She should lose her Select Committee seat, never mind the Chair, and she should lose the whip. The Speaker should reprimand her on the floor of the House. Her DBE is also looking shaky. Gongs have been forfeited for far less than the potential prejudicing both of a criminal investigation in his country, and of a separate criminal investigation in a friendly jurisdiction.

The gender critical feminists have picked the wrong side for the third time. They will also be kicked off everything except Rumble, and everyone who had had anything to do with them will be cancelled for transphobia, which will be presented in terms of real or invented acts of physical violence, some of it fatal. That is how these scams work.

Bringing us to the fact that a few years ago, most of the SWERF and TERF buffet spat on the luck that was a Leader of the Opposition who, while personally ropey and not without some deeply unsound associates, was nevertheless surrounded by people who fully shared the anti-capitalist critique of the sex industry, and who were steeped in the original, ferociously material-realist critique of Foucault by those against whom he had defined himself by having turned.

Leading figures speak quite fondly of the Blair years, when there was no such thing as gender self-identification, but when New Labour at once defined, and was defined by, the obscene popular culture against which they now rail, as some of us tried to do at the time. And not without assistance from them, New Labour is now just Labour again.

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 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.