As the Labour Party is gearing up for a leadership contest, Andy Burnham is emerging as the runaway leader in every poll.
Of course, there is the small matter of the Makerfield by-election the Manchester mayor must win before he can stand, and Reform is polling high in that constituency. However, Andy seems confident, and I have no reason to question his judgement.
However, I have every reason to question, or rather despise, his politics. Burnham is generally to the left of Keir Starmer, which puts him into the territory currently inhabited in spirit by Leon Trotsky, Fidel Castro and Chairman Mao.
However, while steadfast on general ideology, Burnham displays flexibility on specifics. That evokes not so much those villains but the utterly sympathetic Groucho Marx, who once said: “Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them… well, I have others.”
Acting in that spirit, Burnham declared a few days ago that he’d fight that local by-election not on such petty issues as potholes, policing and rubbish bins, but on Britain’s urgent need to rejoin the EU. That spooked Labour MPs who instantly felt Nigel Farage’s fingers tightening on their throats.
“Closer links with Europe, Andy, for crying out loud,” they cried out loud. “Not re-joining, you halfwit. Do the deed but never say the word, what’s there not to understand? Get those keys to 10 Downing Street first – then crawl on your hands and knees all the way to Brussels. First things first, eh?”
Andy got the message and made a swift 90-degree turn, thereby putting himself forward as a potential star of the Royal Ballet.
Once on a roll, he then said he saw no need to put any limit on public borrowing, indirectly accusing Rachel Reeves of being Milton Friedman in disguise. Considering that servicing our current debt already costs way over £100 billion a year, almost twice the defence budget, Burnham’s planned promiscuity sounded a trifle reckless.
The IMF screamed bloody murder, and Andy deftly executed yet another pirouette. Rachel’s prudence [some prudence!] was fine by him, he said. Can’t a chap crack a joke?
Sorry to be talking about Burnham’s views on such inconsequential matters as defence, Britain’s sovereignty, public finances and incandescent bond market. These can’t be described as pivotal – Britain’s future as a nation doesn’t depend on such trivialities one way or another.
Fine, I’ll grant you that they are marginally important. But if we were to single out just one issue that’s central to Britain’s future, political, geopolitical and economic, it would be none of those.
No, the most fundamental question that Andy has to answer to his party’s satisfaction is different: Should men with or without penises be allowed to use women’s loos?
Sorry about wording this delicate problem so crudely. It’s trans rights I’m talking about, in case you are wondering, specifically the lavatorial aspect thereof. This boils down to a question that was never asked even a few years ago: How do we define a woman?
The old, reactionary and discredited answer was based on the chromosomes: if it’s XX, you are a woman; if it’s XY, you are a man. Asked and answered.
Not so fast, said our progressive modernity. What matters is how a person identifies, and never mind chromosomes. When a woman says she is a man, that’s what he is. If a man says he is a woman, she is just that.
That theory was put to a test yet again a couple of weeks ago, when an NHS hospital put a trans man (meaning a woman) into a men’s ward. The rightful inhabitants of those quarters took one look at their new wardmate and saw something that didn’t quite add up. It took them only an hour to ponder that dichotomy, after which the new arrival was gangbanged.
In a similar, earlier development, a violent criminal was put into a women’s prison because he identified as a female. However, he still kept all his male appendages, which that freshly minted woman put to good use by immediately raping half the inmates and even some of the guards.
Those and many similar cases involving trans men and women stoked up the fire of feminists who pitted their pet piety against the lavatorial rights of transsexuals. Hell hath no fury like a feminist forced to share a loo with a man, and the feminists’ superior numbers carried the day.
Following a Supreme Court ruling last year, Bridget Phillipson, women and equalities minister (remind me, who held that post in Walpole’s cabinet?), confirmed yesterday that henceforth men posing as women, however they identify, would be barred from entering women’s loos.
That puts Andy Burnham sharply in focus. For back in 2022 he expressed unequivocal views that were rather different from the present Labour position. Biological men who identify as women, he said, have a right to use women’s loos.
Anyone who disagrees expresses a “minority view” to be ignored, said Burnham. And feminists “supposedly advocating for [sic] women’s rights” are trying to start “culture wars” that Andy had no intention of joining.
My advice to Andy would be not to fight the Makerfield by-election on that issue, but I don’t pretend to be a Labour strategist. That job belongs to Peter Mandelson by right, or would do if he weren’t otherwise occupied with trying to keep himself out of prison.
Step in Rosie Duffield, independent MP who resigned the Labour whip over this very issue. Much as Miss Duffield appreciates Andy Burnham’s stance on such minor issues as defence, sovereignty and public borrowing, she can’t support him until his stance on issues lavatorial has been clarified.
Actually, clarification isn’t what Miss Duffield is after. She wants Burnham to make another U-turn, after which she’ll be happy to submit to the Labour whip again. If Andy agrees to keep trans women (biological men) out of women’s loos, she’ll be happy for him to lead the party and the nation.
As far as Miss Duffield is concerned, Burnam is welcome to bankrupt the country, destroy what little is left of its defences, eliminate border controls, turn Britain into the EU’s vassal – do anything he wants and everything Labour stands for.
But having women who are really men in women’s loos – that’s where Miss Duffield draws the line. God forbid those sideshows do to women what Andy Burnham, Miss Duffield, Keir Starmer and the rest of the Labour Party are doing to Britain.
P.S. Yes, I know Thomas Mann was a great, prophetic writer. Yes, I know his Doctor Faustus is a work of genius. And yes, I used to read him (even the impenetrable Joseph and His Brothers) when I was young. However, call me a philistine, but in my dotage I’m just too old to wade through sentences like this, sage though they doubtless are:
“It is work: art-work for appearance’s sake – and now the question is whether at the present state of our consciousness, our knowledge, our sense of truth, this little game is still permissible, still intellectually possible, still to be taken seriously; whether the work as such, the construction, self-sufficing, harmonically complete in itself, still stand in any legitimate relation to the complete insincerity, problematic conditions, any lack of harmony of our social situation; whether all seeming, even the most beautiful, even precisely the beautiful, has not today become a lie.”