Far too long to post in full here, but sterling stuff from Professor Kathleen Stock. Absolutely indispensable. Read it. Have you read it yet? Why not? Now, remind me who has been in government, well, pretty much forever these days. And who has been defining the paradigm by setting the economic agenda of every Government for nearer 50 years than 40. As Dr Victoria Smith writes:
In Britain, Labour had opportunities to challenge gender ideology that left-leaning parties in other countries lacked. Gender reassignment was already a protected characteristic under the 2010 Equality Act, for which the party could claim credit. Attempts to reform the Gender Recognition Act and make self-identification easier arose under the Tories, with then-Equalities minister Maria Miller dismissing all critics as “fake feminists”.
Feminist groups such as Woman’s Place UK, who organised to challenge, amongst other things, Stonewall’s misrepresentation of the law, have tended to be explicitly left-wing.
Unlike in the US, where the issue is divided on strict party lines, and expressing misgivings about childhood transition places you firmly in the Republican camp, in the UK there was the chance for a mainstream left-wing party to say “this isn’t progressive” — or, at the very least, for them to avoid facilitating the spiralling extremism.
As many feminists have pointed out, trans activism is not left-wing. It might superficially appear that way due to its piggy-backing on the gay rights movement and appropriation of the language of social justice, but it is essentially individualistic, a glittery extension of Thatcher’s “there is no such thing as society”. It ignores the relational and hierarchical aspects of gender in favour of authoritarian demands that one’s self-perception be privileged at all times (what other movement has been so obsessed with controlling how others speak about you even when you are not present?).
It is not accidental that companies that rank highly on Stonewall’s UK Workplace Equality Index have less than impressive gender pay gap figures. It is far less costly to ask employees to put pronouns in their email signatures than it is to reform workplace structures in order, for instance, to accommodate carers.
Those companies come out badly on workers’ rights in general, as Britain itself does, and as Britain therefore does on economic inequality, both of which it would continue to do under a Starmer Government. 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.
Thatcherism nearly 50 years in.
ReplyDeleteIndeed. With its concept of the self-made man or the self-made woman, gender self-identification is where Thatcherism has inevitably ended up. It was an unknown concept in 2010, and has arisen entirely under a Conservative Government. 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. 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.
DeleteHence Thatcher’s destruction of the stockades of male employment, the economic basis of paternal authority in the family and in the wider community. She created the modern Labour Party, the party of middle-class women who used the power of the State to control everyone else, but especially working-class men. Truly, as she herself said, her greatest achievement was New Labour. Leo Abse, who had had the measure of the milk-snatcher, also had the measure of Tony Blair’s androgyny.