In The Front

Even before his defeat in the ring, was Andrew Tate still popular with schoolboys? Teenage trends rarely, if ever, last that long. They are in far greater danger from the person and associates of Ivor Caplin, all bail conditions on whom were lifted last month despite his having tried to meet a 14-year-old boy for sex. And what associates Caplin has. He was a Whip at the time of the Iraq War, with Phil Woolas, and with Dan Norris, who was close to Caplin and whose proxy vote is still cast by the Whips. All three were made Ministers soon after the vote on Iraq. The then Chief Whip was the political patroness, both of Anna Turley, and of Caplin’s close friend, closest ally, former lover, and constituency successor, Peter Kyle. She had also been Parliamentary Private Secretary to John Smith, yet she has said nothing about the failure to ensure that protection from unfair dismissal began with employment.

Kyle joined his old boss in supporting the brief Leadership campaign of Jess Phillips. “I would stab Jeremy Corbyn in the front,” said the woman who was now “Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls”. She has accused British Pakistanis of importing wives for their disabled sons. She claims to have been rude and abusive towards Diane Abbott, although it is possible that she has built her reputation on lying about having used gutter language towards a woman who was old enough to be her mother. Phillips laughs at male suicides, at male cancers, at other men’s health issues, at violence against men, at problems in boys’ educational attainment, and at fathers denied access to their children. She has said that attacks of the kind that were seen in Cologne on the New Year’s Eve of 2015-16, “happen every week in Birmingham.”

And on Tuesday 2 September, Phillips told the House of Commons that, “South Yorkshire police should never have been left to investigate themselves in this matter, and moving those investigations to the NCA is absolutely the right thing to do. I would be lying if I said that over the years I had not met girls who talked to me about how police were part of not just the cover-up but the perpetration.” Read again those words of the Minister who refused a statutory inquiry, an inquiry that had been, and still is, demanded by the Muslim candidate whom she had beaten by only 693 votes at Birmingham Yardley, which he intends to contest again, the wonderful investigative journalist Jody McIntyre. Then read the Epstein Files and worry about inferior cultures with no respect for women and with endemic predation on young girls.

Phillips’s Leadership Campaign was chaired by Wes Streeting, who would have become Leader when, as expected in 2019, the Conservative majority had been much reduced in 2024 but Boris Johnson had remained Prime Minister. Yes, that was only six years ago. If he were still an MP, then Streeting would certainly become Leader after the defeat of Labour by Reform UK in 2029, and he would do so unopposed because the nomination process now made a contested Labour Leadership Election effectively impossible. Streeting may then be Prime Minister within 18 months, since almost all Reform MPs will be freshers. The only thing stopping this is the high likelihood that Streeting will lose his seat to Leanne Mohamad. But although the Greens came fifth at Ilford North last year, they took well over three times more votes than Streeting’s margin of victory.

Meanwhile, the Chief Whip of Caplin, Woolas and Norris has had the gall to endorse a mercifully ignored book that claimed that the accused of the Cleveland child abuse scandal had been guilty all along. False allegations of sexual violence are fundamental to the demonisation of working-class and nonwhite males, which leads to violence that is not restricted to, but which undoubtedly includes, sexual humiliation such as at Medomsley Detention Centre, and such as the United Nations Human Rights Council, in a June 2024 report that was also highly critical of Hamas, found to be inflicted on Palestinian men and boys by the Israeli Defence Forces. A month later, the unrepentant Sde Teiman rapists held a defiant press conference, and their supporters rioted, among them Members of the Knesset and men in the uniforms of the IDF’s Force 100. Fear of the black male is fundamental to the capitalist system that was founded on the transatlantic slave trade, and the slave trade financed enclosure. There has always been One Struggle, on the other side of which in the Corbyn years we vividly recall Phillips’s head cheerleader today, Emma Barnett, whose private education was paid for by the brothels for which her father did time. Emails were discovered between her and him, discussing his “whores”.

Not that Phillips or Barnett can define a woman. On that score, the Supreme Court would uphold whatever Bridget Phillipson put in front of it. When he has not been supporting David Lammy’s attacks on trial by jury and on the right of appeal, then Lord Sumption has been trying to tell you that the Court had permitted separate facilities on the basis of biological sex, but had not required them. “You have gender dysphoria,” I used to think, and even say. “I have depression, but that doesn’t mean the doctor should give me something to kill myself, never mind suggest it to me.” Part of resisting the second atrocity, against which Phillipson voted, is reversing the first. Phillipson is another one who wants to be Leader of the Labour Party, and thus Prime Minister. Yet without a robust material realism, there can be no pursuit of economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, led by those who suffered most as a result of economic inequality, namely the working class, and led by those who suffered most as a result of international conflict, namely the working class and the youth. Anyone would think that such pursuit did not interest Phillipson, Phillips or Streeting.

Feelings are real, but they are not facts. As poverty of aspiration is a real feeling, but economic inequality is a fact, so gender identity is a real feeling, but biological sex is a fact. Those who failed to hold the first line cannot hold the second, and those who are failing to hold the second line will be unable to hold the first. Demonstrably, then, dialectical materialism has too often failed to provide that robust basis. Nor, in itself, can natural science, which cannot prove the ontological existence of material reality, but rather presupposes it. What is needed is Thomism, which by definition exists within the wider Augustinian tradition. Fundamental to both is absolute fidelity to the Roman Magisterium, which is itself irrevocably committed to the Thomist metaphysical system, within which its own indispensable role precludes any degeneration comparable to that of much of the ancestrally Marxian Left into gender self-identification. Phillipson knows this. She needs to act on it. In the meantime, anyone wishing to be sent to one of Phillips’s reeducation camps should submit  to his Catholic school a copy of the recent Petrocchi Report into women deacons. As determined by a Minister who had openly had an abortion, the backlash would fill up the time until he was conscripted.