Korea Straight?

Which politician in North Korea is as critical of the Government there as Nigel Farage is of the Government in Britain? Which newspaper in North Korea is as critical of the Government there as the Daily Mail is of the Government in Britain? Which television station in North Korea is remotely comparable to the GB News of Farage and of the Mail's Andrew Pierce? Hyperbole has its place, but hysteria serves only to discredit the struggle for freedom of expression. That struggle matters.

Not very long ago, the transgender and LGBTQ flags were among those which were invariably waved by the people who had taken to the streets to demand that the Police be defunded, something that the Conservative Government of the day was already doing. Yet those are now the flags of the people who can order that anyone who had not curtsied deeply enough to them be arrested by armed Police Officers.

That, though, is still quite rare. Whereas in the four years between my first and my second spells in prison, one of the most striking changes was that between 60 and 80 per cent of men inside were now there for looking at a woman the wrong way, if we had looked at her at all. My case was the most astonishing that anyone, staff or inmate, had ever heard, but to my mind plenty came close, although people who had spent more time in the system found them run-of-the-mill these days.

For example, there was a man whose ex-wife had turned up at his house with the Police already in tow, thereby placing him in breach of his restraining order, in full view of the Police, the moment that she set foot on his doorstep. That was not an isolated incident. The prisons are at breaking point primarily because of this sort of thing, including the routine remand even of boys of 18 and of men who had never previously had so much as a parking ticket. Yet still the radical feminist lobby professes to hate the Police. What more does it want?

The stockades of working-class male employment were destroyed, and a new ruling elite of middle-class women funded and empowered by the State was created, by the politician who proclaimed the self-made man and the self-made woman. Just as she emerged in the Britain of everything from Danny La Rue and Dick Emery to David Bowie and The Rocky Horror Show, so a comparable figure, emerging in the Britain of the 2020s, would be assumed to be a transwoman.

But one-trick ponies end up in the knacker's yard. In Britain, and perhaps especially in England, male heterosexual transvestism is positively venerable, and male homosexual transvestism will always have a market, so it is back to panto for both of them. Half of one per cent of the population does not get to dictate public policy, a principle that has wider application, since another group, politically far less homogenous, also told the last census that it was that size. In both cases, there is the problem of self-appointed "community leaders".

Likewise, the gender-critical feminists have well and truly burned their bridges, yet either their views on most or all other subjects would be unacceptable to the readers, listeners and viewers of their newer employers, or they were never really left-wing at all. There were and are very, very, very left-wing women who shared their view on this matter, but no one gave them a platform anywhere in the official media, nor will they now. Like a lot of us, and though still a very long way indeed from it, they are lot closer than Farage to living in North Korea.