Trams Before Trans

For the workers, not the woke. Well, for the workers, as such, before the woke, as such. “For the many, not the few” is not universality.

The Leeds trams are costing £2.5 billion, so far, to arrive no earlier than the late 2030s. This is the country of your ever-increasing utility bills, of the HS2 that must have diamond-encrusted platinum tracks, of PPE, of the money paid to Rwanda to take four volunteers (having always said that it would take only 100 people per year), and of the top secret £1,593,535,200 to rent the Bibby Stockholm for two years. And there is more. So very, very, very much more. Never, ever, ever let it be said that there was no money. Someone is getting paid, and it is not us.

Instead, let us build an all-of-the-above transport policy around public transport free at the point of use, including publicly owned railways running on the electricity that public ownership would also supply to charging points in every neighbourhood and village. Astonishingly, and yet not, the fewest charging points for electric vehicles are in the coalfield areas. Also, never forget that buses carry far more passengers than trains do, but those passengers tend not to be politicians or the “opinion-forming” sort of journalists; Jeremy Corbyn was mercilessly derided for having so much as mentioned buses. And so on. Let a thousand flowers bloom. In a well-tended, well-watered garden.

Harnessing the power of the State to deliver an all-of-the-above transport policy is one of the many reasons to want to harness that power to deliver an all-of-the-above energy policy, not least in view of the fact that British operators had just struck oil in the Norwegian North Sea close to the border with the British waters under which new exploration had been banned. Around the twin poles of the civil nuclear power that Britain pioneered and of the clean coal technology in which massively coal-rich Britain was the world leader until the defeat of the miners, let there be oil, gas, lithium, wind, solar, tidal, and everything else, bathing this country in heat and light. This is why we have a State.

That is what we ought to be doing, rather than tagging along with an American invasion of Venezuela on stated grounds that were not even supposed to be taken seriously when everyone knew that the real reason was to take control of the largest proven oil reserves in the world and of vast reserves of gas. And this is what we ought to be doing, rather than tagging along with an American  invasion of oil-rich and gas-rich Nigeria. With all my heart, I wish that I could believe that Donald Trump were going to liberate the Nigerian Christians. But local Christian communities have always suffered desperately during and after these interventions, and the interveners have never given a damn.

The same would happen, and may already be beginning to happen, when clodhopping “Crusaders” decided to “take back” areas of Britain with largely Muslim populations. They hate the King with a fervour that I have never encountered, whether directed at him or at his late mother, from even the most ardent republican on the Left. I have always said that the eventual threat to the monarchy would come from the Right, but I had assumed that that would be because it was so obviously incompatible with Thatcherite meritocracy. Yet here we are.

And yet these would-be overthrowers of the Throne also see themselves as the guardians of “the traditional rural way of life”. Not only that, but they would be barking up the wrong tree even if they still wanted the King at the top of it. For example, 30 per cent or more of lamb and mutton bought in this country is halal. The South Asian Muslim diet, at least, is decidedly meaty. As is at least the Ashkenazi Strictly Orthodox diet, which is a much smaller market but a rapidly growing one.

Virtually all sheep in Britain end up in the human food chain, and disproportionately on the plates of those who kept kosher or halal. Yet the experimental puberty blockers that are to be given to children as young as 10 or even eight have already been banned in sheep, which they gave impaired memory, altered behaviour, enlarged amygdala, and lasting brain damage even once the treatment had stopped. What happened to those sheep? There was already a natural alliance between the opponents of puberty blockers and those who adhered to kosher or halal. It may have found its immediate basis.

Those who have been formed by gender criticism have also been shaken by the realisation that there was no law against sex-selective abortion. Since the legalisation of abortion itself, there never has been. Yet the Scotland of the post-Sturgeon SNP is moving to legalise sex-selective abortion explicitly. Whatever happened to gender self-identification? Was sex not “assigned at birth”? On what pro-choice grounds could anyone object to this particular choice? If half of unborn children were male, in the old-fashioned sense of having Y chromosomes, then how could they be part of a woman’s body? And in that case, then how could the other half be part of that body, either?

Yet never in British history has there been a prosecution for sex-selective abortion. In 2013, the Director of Public Prosecutions, Keir Starmer, declined to bring charges against two doctors who had been caught on camera agreeing to arrange abortions of girls because of their sex. He wrote to the Attorney General, Dominic Grieve, that,  “The law does not, in terms, expressly prohibit gender-specific abortions; rather it prohibits any abortion carried out without two medical practitioners having formed a view, in good faith, that the health risks of continuing with a pregnancy outweigh those of termination.” Starmer had concluded that there would be no public interest in a prosecution. That has been the conclusion in every such case.

The law forbids the inhumane killing of third trimester vertebrate fetuses of any species except our own. Yes, really. Margaret Thatcher abolished the time limit on abortion where there was “a substantial risk that if the child were born it would suffer from such physical or mental abnormalities as to be seriously handicapped”, of which the risk did not need to be quantified, nor the abnormalities specified. Even before that fig leaf was discarded, this country already had 48 abortions for every 100 live births. That was not because Muslims did not want daughters. Muslims are not keen on abortion, and there are far too few of them to produce those numbers. China is less than two per cent Muslim, and there are only 200,000 Muslims, mostly foreign workers, among the 51.75 million inhabitants of South Korea. Taiwan is less than one per cent Muslim, as is Vietnam.

The Muslim 14 per cent of the population of India accounts for only 6.6 per cent of sex-selective abortions in the country that accounts for 50 per cent of the world’s missing female births. Like the husband who murdered her, Anu Bansal was a Hindu, as are 86.7 per cent of those who procure female foeticide, although Hindus are only 80 per cent of the population. The figures for Sikhs are 4.9 and 1.7. The practice is increasingly evident among the richer residents of the urban areas of Nepal, which is proportionally the most Hindu country in the world.

Muhammad condemned the female infanticide that was prevalent in pre-Islamic Arabia, and while there is a certain culture of it in urban Pakistan, British Pakistanis mostly descend from the God-fearing countryside, with even New Mirpur City only the seventy-fourth most populous. There is no such culture in Bangladesh. Shockat Adam, Adnan Hussain, Iqbal Mohamed and Ayoub Khan would undoubtedly vote for a Bill or an amendment to ban sex-selective abortion.

Puberty blockers and sex-selective abortion are among the fruits of the classification of femaleness as in itself a medicable condition by means of the Pill, which is simply not a medicine at all. It is, in point of fact, a poison, designed precisely to stop healthy body parts from performing their natural functions, and accordingly attended by all manner of horrific side effects, for no reason except to make women permanently available for the sexual gratification of men, and despite the unrivalled effectiveness of Natural Family Planning if it is taught and practised properly, a practice only possible by a faithful married couple. Puberty blockers are also just such a poison, and there is now argument against them that is not an argument against the Pill, or vice versa. Moreover, the Pill has wrought yet further havoc by filling our water supply with synthetic oestrogens. Like puberty blockers in mutton, in lamb, and in ewe’s milk products, but as yet on a vastly larger scale, this is both a social justice and an environmental concern.

Instead, let us celebrate the full compatibility between the highest view of human demographic, economic, intellectual and cultural expansion and development, and the most active concern for the conservation of the natural world and of the treasures bequeathed by such expansion and development in the past. That means growth, industry, what someone once nearly called “the white heat of technology”, and the equitable distribution of their fruits among and within the nations of the world, for everyone to enjoy at least the standard of living that we ourselves already enjoyed. Including in the form of trams.