With thanks to Chetan Bhatt and Paul Knaggs for some definitions of things that we know but are very good at forgetting to take into account.

A very wonderful am dram group presented a rendition of Peter and the Starcatcher in my town last Christmas. Good it was, funny it was, troubling it was, because it is, after all, a sequel to J M Barrie’s Peter Pan, which mothers have learned on instinct to avoid, and modern identarians avoid on principle because Barrie was A Bad Man.

It was a great show though, and inadvertently put on an amazing parable one night, when the battery failed in the floating light-ball that was serving as Tinkerbell, and those in the audience old enough to know the rules immediately produced a resounding wave of cheers and applause, trying to believe Tinkerbell back into existence.

Sadly, material reality being what it is, it didn’t work. Great show though – even the mistakes were impressive.

So – this is an article about what happened when ‘progressive forces’ tried to lead the world away from reality, and even now are causing widespread destruction because they haven’t quite realised that their batteries have failed.

Chetan Bhatt on the self and ‘being good’

Here’s a list of things we all know but tend to forget, paraphrased from Bhatt’s The Revolutionary Road to me: Identity politics and the western left.

‘Moral’ behaviour is acting according to rules we have all agreed are (or should be) universal, having willed them into existence, apparently independently of any cultural, nationalist or religious baggage.

The above is what we need to think of when we talk about ‘right and wrong’.

‘Good and bad’ are slightly different, a ‘moral’ person has a ‘good’ character, traditionally because they are of ‘good breeding’, or more recently, having traits such as ‘justness’ or ‘civility’, or a record of doing ‘good’ deeds.

‘Good and bad’ trump ‘right and wrong’.

‘Virtue’ can be inherent or learned, and leads to acts done independently of the need to be seen to do good. ‘Virtue signalling’, a common strategy of both politicians and corporate PR departments, is something else.

Big question: which muddling up of these ideas do you think leads the Sultana contingent in Your Party to believe you build a mass-movement by rubbishing and banishing anyone who doesn’t hold the same beliefs as you, or doesn’t give words quite the same meaning you do?

With a bit of thought, you can see how different definitions of those apparently similar ideas (good and bad, right and wrong) sometimes makes the world confuse, eg, materialist feminists with conservative bigots.

There is much sociological discussion in the pages of Bhatt’s book about how individualism and communitarianism pan out in different cultures, which leads to a well-evidenced requirement to question over-generalised ideas such as ‘the West invented the self’, or ‘the African self is less individualistic’. Bhatt quotes a southern African proverb, ‘a person is a person through other persons’, presenting the range of ideas he found in African writings as ‘a rebuke to reductionist identity politics, [and a] guard against individual and group narcissism.’

Amongst the glut of home-made video clips going around during COVID lockdown, I remember one by a ‘transgender woman’ (this being a term notably without definition in the vast majority of discussions in which it arises). This individual tearfully told the world of the tragedy of isolated trans people. He was unable to go out and parade his womanness, unable to interact in groups where he’d hear himself called ‘she’, and therefore his identity was evaporating, and he was bereft.

Looking at the comments on the video, lots of women expressed sympathy, but some pointed out that their kids, their periods, their osteoporosis and the pressures laid upon them by families and communities had not disappeared, so they were having no trouble remembering they were women.

Some managed to call on their empathy as well as their intelligence, and do both — but they were nevertheless generally followed by strings of ‘woke’ comments, telling the women they were wrong and/or bad and/or unkind.

The end of #NoDebate

Feminists who’ve been working for a decade now to push back against Stonewall et al’s ‘transwomen are women, #NoDebate’ campaign are well aware of the procedural advice the gender ideology brigade commissioned from Dentons…

Click here for downloads and discussion from Mumsnet.

It explained the importance of preventing public debate on the consequences of ‘sex change’ theory and practice.

My goodness we feminists worked long and hard, against an endless barrage of slander and sabotage, to make sure that debate happened and, as Dentons predicted, the result was disastrous for the gender-identity industry.

The ‘woke’, the ‘progressive’, the people Bhatt describes as ‘identarian academics, NGOs and their staff, community leaders, students and activists, usually representing a section of the Western middle class’ stood firm in their received moral beliefs, but a large swathe of the public did not, so that for example, a popular response to the Stonewall campaign was ‘if that means a bloke in his 50s can follow my daughter into the loos you can stuff it where the sun don’t shine.’

A moment that sticks in my mind and brings a smile whenever I remember it, was when I was one of a team organising a feminist meeting and we’d had to scout out venues in secret, with the local Pride activists attempting to track us – they had already sent slanderous emails to ALL the venues in town they feared might accept us – but we were in a community centre that was pretty much off the radar of the teachery, social workery, middle-class, Guardianista ‘be kind’ types, who seemed to fear nothing as much as the horror of being called ‘transphobic’.

As ever, we explained to the venue the dangers of hosting such meetings – but this time, we were explaining it to a different kind of women.

The centre manager still stands there in the eye of my memory, hands on hips, so appropriately framed by the canteen serving window, and she’s saying through a hearty laugh, “they want to bully us? Oh, bring it on!”

When the BBC’s Tim Davie fell on his sword recently over the BBC’s many failures in reporting reality, it is fitting that it was Paul Knaggs, editor of Labour Heartlands who reported the event as being as much to do with their comprehensive erasure of the fact that “the idea of ‘gender identity’ [is] spurious or offensive to many people” as it did with Trump’s complaint about their misleading edits.

I say that because Labour Heartlands has always aimed to explore and present the views of actual, traditional Labour voters from the towns that were Labour’s traditional voting base, rather than the ever-shifting views of whoever’s doing well in Westminster just now. Gender ideologists’ capture of organisations such as the BBC was the lynch-pin of the #NoDebate strategy, but the game’s up now, and it’s bloggers such as Knaggs who have now taken up the baton with the persistence necessary to show ‘the left’ that  much of their  adopted ‘progressive’ language means nothing, or is designed to camouflage rather than define anything real, and that they are destroying, rather than building the movement that socialism requires.

A prime example of that portion of the left that (in my view) requires quotation marks is Zara Sultana’s ‘Grassroots Left’ in Your Party who, if they get their way in the current elections, will have finally stymied the latest attempt at a popular movement around Jeremy Corbyn. They have already whittled 850k supporters down to around 50k members by chasing away those who in Sultana’s opinion have ‘socially conservative views’, those who are lefty but favour a mixed economy, those who have doubts about ‘dual membership’ and ‘boomers’ in general. Why? Because like all good identarians, they need evil enemies in order to be properly ‘marginalised’.

The tragedy of the identarians is that they believe in inherently ‘good’ and ‘bad’ people, so have no hesitation in ‘cancelling’, slandering and marginalising any ‘bad’ people they discover and yet at the same time, they believe the social creation (and therefore potential destruction) of identity is the ultimate reality, hence their fear of exposing trans people to anyone who will ‘destroy’ their ‘identity’ (as the fairytale little boy destroyed the naked emperor). Their argument crumbles in the face of hard working class reality when they insist on the absolute reality of Tinkerbell, clapping madly and demanding that the rest of us clap too because if we don’t, she dies.

The public reaction to media outlets who fall over themselves to be ‘progressive’ and end up telling you the latest school shooter was ‘a woman in a dress’ and that a male non-binary person turned out of a women’s changing room is tragically ‘marginalised’ is – as it should be, scathing. The game is up.

Victims and villains

It is fitting that amongst the not-really-revelations in the Epstein files are emails that show up the true nature of the ‘gender doctors’ who were the drivers of what happened to our children. Our task now it to make clear once and for all that feminists are not the villains of this story, and the mature males who made a tidy living out of it all are not the victims. For example, here’s Magdalen Berns (materialist feminist) v Alex Drummond (professional transwoman)…

Last ditch for Your Party?

When the current Your Party CEC election results are declared, we will know once and for all whether Your Party can survive but, whether it does or not, let’s make absolutely sure that ‘the left’ does not fall into the identity politics trap any more. Let’s say it loud and clear, every time the topic comes up: It’s the kids who queued up for hormones and irreversible surgery who are the victims of gender ideology. Also the whistleblowers, mostly women, who lost jobs, social and political positions are victims and sadly, Jeremy Corbyn’s attempt to start a new party is very likely to be the latest casualty.

PS…

Again, many thanks to Chetan Bhatt. As a feminist activist, I’ve known for years that the enemy of feminism and socialism is emanating largely from universities and charities, but now I’ve read his chapter, ‘Speaking power to truth’, I know how it works, and why it’s such an efficient destroyer of real socialism. In short, NGOs put themselves in charge of civil rights, minority advocacy or LGBTQ+ ‘communities’ and receive vast amounts of government and corporate money. In return, they ‘displace politics and de-politicize mass struggles.’

His words ring in my ears daily, as I look around the Your Party whatapps in the run up to the all-important exec-committee elections. Everywhere I look, I see the ‘grassroots left’ arguing over procedure and slagging off perceived enemies in the party, whilst ‘the many’ talk about energy companies, plans for housing, for the economy, for the NHS – and now I understand why the identarians (team Sultana) can’t survive without those bitter battles and witch-hunts, and I know how to spot a real, materialist socialist (team Corbyn and some of the ‘independents’) at 20 paces.

And thanks to Paul Knaggs, mentioned here as an example of those few male socialist activists who did listen, and who persistently use their platforms to blow the whistle whenever identity politics is in action, undermining feminism, genuine anti-racism and socialism.

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