Accusing the Tories of starting a culture war against minority identity groups and their supporters is rather like accusing Ukraine of starting a war against Russia. Or at least it would be had the Conservatives shown even a tenth of the pluck demonstrated by Ukrainians in seeking to repel their tormentors.
That didn’t stop the SNP’s new Westminster leader Stephen Flynn having a go at Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday. ‘This is the Conservative party seeking to stoke a culture war against some of the most marginalised people in society,’ claimed Flynn about the government’s blocking of Scotland’s radical new gender recognition legislation.
There are so many Tory MPs who cannot be trusted on this stuff that voting Conservative again would represent the triumph of hope over experience
For socially and culturally conservative voters, the problem is just the opposite: while few would accept the left-wing framing of any resistance to progressive fads as a belligerent culture war, millions would like to have a reliable ally when it comes to upholding long-established norms.
And the Conservative party isn’t it. It hasn’t been at least since the then Equalities Minister Penny Mordaunt embraced woke magical thinking at the Commons despatch box in March 2021 by claiming on behalf of the government that female trans people actually are men and males actually women.
It almost goes without saying that none of the other parties represented in parliament and which stand candidates in Great Britain show any interest in preserving cultural or social norms either: Labour luminaries tend simply to squirm when asked whether a woman can have a penis or if only a woman can have a cervix. The Mordaunt doctrine is dominant in their party too, as is the case in the Green party and among Welsh and Scottish nationalists. Meanwhile the Lib Dems banned a member from standing as a candidate for the crime of wearing a t-shirt sporting the slogan: ‘Woman: adult human female.’
This week Ms Mordaunt has turned her ID-politics guns on the Church of England over its failure yet to give the go-ahead to same-sex marriage services. ‘I want all of my constituents and others to be able to have the right to have their relationships solemnised in their local parish,’ she wrote in a letter to the Bishop of Portsmouth. As it happens, I agree with her on this: that would indeed be nice. But then again this is a religion, with core tenets backed by scripture. Some people in the Church of England still take that kind of stuff quite seriously. Yet there is zero recognition of this in Penny’s Epistle to the Pompey-ans.
Anyone hoping that Rishi Sunak’s invoking of a Section 35 order blocking the SNP’s new law to speed-up gender self-ID would mark a concerted swing back in a conservative direction was swiftly disappointed when the government confirmed it will include trans people in a new law banning so-called ‘conversion therapy’.
In the case of transsexualism there is surely a case to argue that any ‘conversion’ being done is that from birth sex to a new gender identity. And while few social conservatives would ban that, most of us would wish to see it regulated.
But no, the Tories have naturally accepted the leftist framing which has it that conversion therapy in this field is any effort to persuade someone who feels they are trapped in a body of the wrong sex that maybe they aren’t and that irreversible hormonal or surgical treatment may not put them on the path to happiness.
The current Equalities Minister, Kemi Badenoch, is writing to Conservative MPs to tell them she will make sure the new law is set out in such a way so as not to criminalise parents or professionals who run such arguments past unhappy teenagers.
Ms Badenoch is widely believed by senior Tories to have been the driving force behind the decision to apply the Section 35 order but also to have decided to keep a low profile on the matter. One told me: ‘She is like a hunter-killer submarine in Whitehall, seeking out and destroying woke lunacy from below the waves.’
In which case it is high time she surfaced. Because the Tories urgently need to convince their potential voters that they can be trusted to protect women’s single-sex spaces and to ensure that vulnerable young people are not caught up in a fashionable social contagion that leads them to do things they will one day come to bitterly regret.
The Scottish decision is not nearly sufficient to ensure this given the Tory record of the past dozen years in office. As one gender critical feminist, Dara Morefield, put it on Twitter: ‘The UK already has: rapists in female prisons, men in women’s sport, men in female toilets… women’s refuges which admit men and so on.’
And the Tory reputation is hardly helped by former ministers such as Caroline Nokes spouting progressive platitudes on Sunday morning politics shows or the new Education Secretary Gillian Keegan saying she does not think 16 is necessarily too young to adopt a legally-binding new gender identity.
In Kemi we trust. But there are so many Tory MPs who cannot be trusted on this stuff that voting Conservative again would represent the triumph of hope over experience. And right now experience wins the day: just assume the Conservatives are going to let you down because at least it saves time.
Comments