Rishi Sunak has an outstanding bet of one thousand pounds with Piers Morgan on whether he can deport anyone to Rwanda before the General Election. But no one is ever supposed to be sent there. The point is to rile up the base every time that a flight is prevented.
If you can legislate that Rwanda is a safe country, then you can legislate that a man is a woman. Should you need to. Much as I would love to see the Cass Report implemented, do not hold your breath. The corrections are being issued, but the damage is done. It is widely believed that Dr Hilary Cass disregarded 98 per cent of research in the field, with the clear implication that that was because it disagreed with her preordained conclusion. Politics is low, and this is low politics.
Next, and you read it here first, will be that Dr Cass was a second wave feminist from central casting, handpicked to deliver a report that a state broadcaster has already described as "Far Right". On Police advice, she no longer uses public transport. A correspondent advises me that that state broadcaster's soap opera for teenagers has four transgender characters, one of whom the writers transitioned because the actor was doing it in real life. Who needs to change the law?
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.
I have no plan to join the Workers Party of Britain, although nor would I expect to stand against it. If, however, it did not contest North Durham, then I would. 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. We have made a start.
Hollyoaks has been sacking people left, right and centre.
ReplyDeleteYet it still has remarkable influence over its target audience. And then there is the hold that Jordan Gray has over the second state broadcaster that the gender-bending Margaret Thatcher gave Britain in the form, unlike the BBC, of a standard nationalised company.
DeleteThe gender-bending Margaret Thatcher is spot on, imagine her now.
ReplyDeleteOr then. She emerged in the Britain of everything from Danny La Rue and Dick Emery to David Bowie and The Rocky Horror Show, because of course she did. The 1980s were the age of Boy George, Marilyn, and all sorts, not least among her own closest political supporters. Again, of course.
DeleteHence Thatcher's destruction of the stockades of male employment, which were the economic basis of paternal authority in the family and in the wider community, an authority that cannot be restored before the restoration of that basis. Thatcher 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.
Emerging in the Britain of the 2020s, a figure comparable to Thatcher would just be assumed to be a transwoman, and that would be that. It was not awfully different 50 years ago.
Cass is going to be forgotten in a year's time isn't it?
ReplyDeleteThe widespread triumphalism is misplaced, yes.
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