so long, Old Blighty... nice knowin' ya'

Headline:

The low-key lunacy of Britain’s new ruling class
The new Labour government is full of people who believe the craziest things.

If you had told me a few years ago that one day Britain would have a secretary of state who thinks violent male paedos should be housed in women’s prisons, I’d have thought you mad. And yet here we are. Meet Lisa Nandy, Britain’s new secretary of state for culture, media and sport. She was asked at a Labour leadership hustings in 2020 if male criminals who identify as female, like Christopher Worton, should be banged up with men or women. ‘I believe fundamentally in people’s right to self-ID’, she said. ‘Trans women are women and trans men are men and should be accommodated in the prison of their choosing.’ Shorter version: put Worton in with the ladies.

And who is this Christopher Worton that Ms Nandy was specifically asked about? He’s a paedophile who started identifying as ‘Zoe Lynes’ shortly after his conviction for rape. He raped two girls, aged 13 and 15, five times. Yet Nandy said that a) he’s a woman (‘trans women are women’) and b) he should be in the women’s clink, even though he’s an obvious danger to women. If you heard a crank on a stepladder say that at Speakers’ Corner, you’d film it for social-media clickbait. Yet this was from a woman who was then running to lead the Labour Party and who’s now in charge of culture across the whole of the UK.

Maybe she’s changed her mind. After all, people in her party flip-flop a lot on the trans question. Including party leader and new PM, Keir Starmer, who went from saying 99.9 per cent of women don’t have a penis (which means one in 1,000 do!) to agreeing with Tony Blair that ‘a woman is with a vagina and a man is with a penis’. Yet even if Nandy has come to her senses, we’re within our rights to ask how it was possible that such a senior politician subscribed to an utterly lunatic ideology as recently as four years ago. How one of our new rulers fell so hard for fashionable hocus pocus. What if it becomes all the chattering-class rage to demand the destruction of art made by ‘problematic’ people – might our new culture overlord go along with that frenzy, too?

I don’t mean to pick on Nandy. Because the truth is they’re all mad. Our new government is stuffed with people who believe the craziest shit. Sticking with the bizarrely thorny issue of what is a woman, Anneliese Dodds, the new women and equalities minister, fumbles on that, too. Asked on International Women’s Day in 2022 how she would define a woman, Ms Dodds said, ‘Well, I have to say that there are different definitions’. There are? Pushed, she said it ‘depend[s] what the context is’. JK Rowling quipped that maybe under a Labour government International Women’s Day will become ‘We Who Must Not Be Named Day’. Let’s see.

Angela Rayner, our new deputy prime minister, was once asked about Isla Bryson, the male rapist who identifies as female and who was briefly housed in a women’s prison under Nicola Sturgeon’s unmourned woke tyranny north of the border. In transitioning, said Rayner, Bryson is doing what ‘they believe is right for them’, ‘and that’s fine, we respect that’. You respect a rapist’s claim that he has magically morphed into a woman? I’m going out on a limb here, but the words ‘right’, ‘fine’ and ‘respect’ surely don’t belong in any sentence that includes ‘Isla Bryson’. Bridget Phillipson, our new education secretary, recently said that people with penises can become ‘women’ and if they have a gender-recognition certificate they should use the female toilets. One shudders to think what will become of science teaching under her rule.

Starmer’s mad ramblings on sex are well known. It is ‘not right’ to say only women have a cervix, he once said. We’re hearing a lot of talk about Sir Keir being the first human-rights lawyer and first son of a toolmaker to occupy Downing Street. I’m far more intrigued by the fact that he is surely the first-ever PM who cannot differentiate between the male and female of the species. Or at least he wasn’t able to do so just a couple of years ago.

I’m old enough to remember when the tabloid press was full of shock-horror coverage of the ‘loony left’. People like Linda Bellos, the eccentric Labour leader of Lambeth Council in London in the late 1980s. Yet these days, Bellos is a paragon of common sense, frequently questioning the idea that blokes can become lesbians, while the ‘sensibles’ of the Labour Party leadership are out there giving respect to rapists who ‘become women’, suggesting putting male paedos in women’s prisons and positing that there are tens of thousands of women around with a penis in their skirts. The moderates are the loonies now.

Read the rest. And there's more where that came from! What a shame. I think I'd better visit the UK—well, the British Isles—before everything that made it worth visiting disappears completely thanks to creatures like Lisa Nandy (is she named after the Hindu god Śiva's bull?). Meanwhile, think on the irony of "paedo-lovers" calling the other side racists.

Y'all work this shit out as a family, hear?

ADDENDUM: to be clear, I have no love for conservatives like Boris Johnson, either. From what I could see, he proved to be an utter failure to UK conservative ideals, and like Angela Merkel, he seemed content to let questionable migrants into Britain by the unmanageable shipful (Rishi Sunak blames Johnson for this mess), to fumble Brexit, to get COVID (and to engage in repressive lockdown mania), and so much more. One might as well switch over to Labour; at least their agenda, though nutty, is out there for the people to see. Johnson's stealth leftism was appalling. To think that people used to believe he could be the British Donald Trump. Not even close. Flamboyant, obnoxious, pugnacious (and constantly assaulted) Nigel Farage comes a lot closer to filling that role.

Assume for a moment that this UK election was totally legitimate, unrigged, whatever. If that's the case, then I hope the voters get what they deserve, good and hard. Enjoy Starmer, guys! If you become economically prosperous and demographically harmonious over the next few years, congratulations! Otherwise, the UK looks like most of the rest of Europe: on a suicidal track with no intention of swerving.