It is more than nine years since I was suspended by the Labour party for – I think – a comment I made about Palestine. I had written: ‘If you handed over Israel to the Palestinians they would turn it into Somalia before you could say Yom Kippur.’ I remember having worried about the sentence a little – not because of its meaning, but because I wasn’t sure that ‘Yom Kippur’ was quite right in that context. I thought, and still do, that ‘Allahu akbar!’ might be better, but there we are. Anyway it was either that or a following sentence where I wrote: ‘For many Muslims the anti-Semitism is visceral, an ingrained part of their unpleasant ideology.’
People like Michael O’Flaherty are still happy to dance a jig to its hugely outdated tunes
That deeply troubled young man Owen Jones described one or both sentences as being ‘rampant racism’ and I soon got a letter from some ghastly trade union hack called John Stolliday to appear before a Labour party disciplinary committee to explain myself. The note made it clear that I could bring a friend with me, but that they wouldn’t be allowed to speak throughout the hearing. At first I thought I might employ my dog Jessie as my designated friend, in the hope that she might bite Stolliday, but dogs – unless they were assistance dogs – were not allowed. So I settled upon a blow-up doll I had found online called Cathy Lovecum who, while entirely silent, had a mouth which was permanently wide open, as if in protest at some outrage. That seemed to me the ideal recourse. In the end I didn’t bother with the hearing, having been a little wearied by the party for at least two decades.
I was reminded of this whole business by the behaviour of certain Palestinians following the signing of that ceasefire. Armed gangs roaming the country, Hamas carrying out ad hoc executions of people they suspected were ‘collaborators’. You’d think they might busy themselves tidying up a bit, wouldn’t you? Much as I would like to join in with the general euphoria regarding the prospects for peace in the Middle East, I find it difficult to do so because it is still the Palestinians we’re dealing with here. I am not sure I have ever written a truer sentence than the one which suggested they would turn the country into Somalia. Although the bit about some – many – Muslims being viscerally anti-Semitic comes close, I suppose. The converse statements in both cases sound absurd – that Palestinians have a long history of organising their affairs with diligence, equanimity, an absence of corruption and never with recourse to violence, and that not a single Muslim harbours any anti-Semitic inclinations – but there we are, rampant racism.
I had decided not to write about the Middle East this week in case I got into more trouble and another accusation of racism, but I’ve rather blown that now. What really grabbed my attention was a different story, one about that very popular dancing Paddy, toodle-oo, toodle-oo, to be sure, the one from Riverdance, unexpectedly wading into our trans debate.
Apparently, addressing the issue of the Supreme Court decision which made it fairly clear that there are two sexes and there’s an end to it, Michael Flatley said: ‘It should be ensured that steps taken towards implementing the Supreme Court judgment avoid a situation where a person’s legal gender recognition is voided of practical meaning, to the extent that it leaves trans people in an unacceptable “intermediate zone”.’ That doesn’t sound much like the words of the son of a plumber from County Sligo made good, I thought – and later discovered that in fact I had got the wrong man. It wasn’t the Lord of the Dance at all, but a superannuated lawyer called Michael O’Flaherty, who has spent his life dreaming up tendentious, not to mention stupid, legislation in two institutions for which I and presumably all right-thinking people have precisely zero respect, i.e. the Council of Europe and the United Nations.
I went a bit cold on the story following this discovery – I had a whole diatribe in my head about how the likes of ol’ Val Doonican didn’t lecture us about our political arrangements, but just got on with singing soporific ballads about goats and stuff, in a jumper and a pair of slippers. But the letter from O’Flaherty to our Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, annoyed me somewhat at first, at least until I realised it was an excellent excuse to disassociate ourselves fully from the European Convention on Human Rights, which has become a meaningless encumbrance.
The obvious answer to Mr O’Flaherty is that gender certificates are a ludicrous and unnecessary invention by liberals to support their deluded beliefs that everybody can be exactly what they want to be, regardless of either their chromosomes or the presence of a large, or indeed small, mutton dagger hanging down between their legs. Perhaps this latest meddling will persuade Shabana that the ECHR cannot be reformed, no matter how obviously it might need reforming and no matter how many countries demand that it must be. Back in the early summer, she addressed the Council of Europe and demanded a programme of reformation, saying: ‘Public confidence in the rule of law is fraying.’ On this occasion she was referring to the ECHR preventing us from deporting grooming gang members and drug dealers either to their home countries or a third party, but I am sure she is as sensible on the issue of transgenderism as she is on the asylum seekers business.
The truth is that the ECHR will never be reformed, because people like Michael O’Flaherty are still happy to dance a jig to its hugely outdated tunes, and will resist all change. Back in the summer Shabana praised its longevity, despite its fatal flaws, but I wonder if she might now be prepared to resile from such an affection and pull us out of both it and the Council of Europe.
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