One of today’s most insightful thinkers, Thomas Sowell, points out that no institution in history has ever achieved a balance accurately reflecting the country’s demographics.
Barring a miracle, he insists, such a balance has never been achieved because it is unachievable. Prof. Sewell doesn’t realise that, in England, there is no need to bar miracles. Our Conservative Party can wave a magic wand and hey, presto.
According to PM Johnson and Party Chairman Dowden, the Tories intend to make sure that exactly half of their MPs are women. That’s not good enough to disprove Sowell’s observation.
After all, women make up not 50 per cent of the population, but 50.59. So, though the stated intention is a step in the right direction, it’s only a first step nonetheless. Our ruling party should set its sights 0.59 per cent higher.
The Tories saw the light after Neil Parish, MP, was caught watching porn on his phone while sitting on the venerable green benches during a parliamentary debate.
Mr Parish explained that, looking for a website selling combine harvesters, he pushed a wrong button and instead found himself watching a woman corrupting the morals of a sheepdog, or some such. Can happen to anyone, I suppose, we’ve all done it.
Yet Central Office didn’t accept Mr Parish’s excuse, and he is being hounded, as it were, out of politics. Now, a normal reaction to that incident would be to tell all MPs to concentrate on the proceedings and refrain from watching videos of any kind, but especially those depicting unconventional sexual practices.
Yet normal reactions no longer exist in our abnormal world. Hence Chairman Dowden, his mind sharpened by the shrieks from the Labour benches, constructed a Hegelian syllogism in his mind.
Thesis: Most porn viewers are men. Antithesis: Women are offended, presumably because they fear being made redundant by men’s focus on DIY sex. Synthesis: Ergo, says Mr Dowden, the Tories need to ensure their candidate list “reflects the fact that half the population are women”.
The synthesis strikes me as a bit of a non sequitur, but the road to hell is paved with the bodies of pedants trying to discern logic in modern politics. Mr Dowden then went on to reinforce this melancholy observation.
“I’ve reopened the candidates list,” he said, “and I want to get the brightest and the best.” As a UK voter and Her Majesty’s subject, I welcome this intention. Yet as a rational man, I smell another logical rat there.
What if the desideratum of getting “the brightest and the best” clashes with the one to “reflect the fact that half the population are women”? I’m not saying women can’t be the brightest and the best. They can be and often are.
It’s just that the probability of filling the desired 50 per cent quota (let’s not quibble about the missing 0.59 per cent) with women meriting that description is statistically negligible.
In fact, the same observation would hold true for any quota: men, women, other, white, black, anything in between – you name it, any woke quota guarantees that “the best and the brightest” will fall by the wayside.
Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries went Chairman Dowden one better. She said that the only way of tackling Westminster sleaze would be to ensure a parliamentary “majority of women”.
We aren’t talking proportional representation any longer. Unless Secretary Dorries is merely concerned about the 0.59 per cent shortfall in Chairman Dowden’s plan, she wants to discriminate against men. She also wants to draw “more people from diverse backgrounds into politics.”
This commendable desire was promoted by reports of sordid behaviour in Parliament, of a kind that makes Anatomy of a Scandal look like a G-rated film about a Sunday school outing.
MPs get drunk, throw up in a Commons’ bar, have noisy sex in parliamentary offices (one hopes before throwing up), send what they call “dick pics” to female colleagues, liken them to prostitutes because of the way they dress, cavort with real rather than sartorial prostitutes for the sake of comparison, make unwanted and physical passes, and in general act in a manner incompatible with the dignity of the Mother of All Parliaments.
If such incidents are indeed regular occurrences, we have a problem. Yet I’m confused by Secretary Dorries’s confidence that drawing “more people from diverse backgrounds into politics” will provide an effective solution.
Logically speaking, this confidence has to be based on the certainty that people from such commendable backgrounds are less capable of swinish behaviour than those of a more unfortunate lineage. This tallies with neither empirical observation nor statistical evidence.
My confusion deepens. There I was, thinking that Conservative Central Office worships in the temple of demographic statistics. Now it turns out that very different deities sit at the top of their totem pole.
One of my pet observations is that our democracy run riot manifestly doesn’t elevate to government those fit to govern. The problem with Parliament, therefore, is systemic, not symptomatic.
Trying to solve it with quotas or any other ad hoc measures will therefore be like treating a brain tumour with aspirin. Yet I am sure that neither Secretary Dorries nor Chairman Dowden is overly concerned with solving the problem of scum rising to the top of our politics.
They just want the Tory Party to appear wokier than thou, or rather than Labour. This, they hope, will pave their way to another electoral triumph.
If they are right, then our electorate is unfit to elect. If they are wrong, then we get Labour, which will again prove that our electorate is unfit to elect.
Those unfit to elect voting in those unfit to govern. What a miraculous metamorphosis from the days of Disraeli and Gladstone.
Three thoughts: 1) While dealing with serious subjects, it is good to read some humor again on these pages (a nice break from the atrocities in Ukraine); 2) While it might be true that more men than women watch porn, it is the women making porn that men watch (unless they watch gay porn, and then women are not involved and should not be offended); 3) In our modern age we no longer need such hard quotas – simply ask a sufficient number of current male MPs to “identify” as female and the problem is solved.
Another thought – since the birds and the bees and the flowers and the trees are also affected by our (non-green) governments, why are they not given a voice? Someone needs to get to work on this immediately! (Which way is the cockroach vote leaning?)
Your Point 3 is a stroke of genius. But I’m not sure it would work. I for one failed on a couple of occasions trying to gain access to the women’s dressing room at my tennis club by claiming to identify as a woman. But hey, nothing ventured…
It’s interesting to note that the Conservative Party has thus far produced two female Prime Ministers, in contrast to Labour’s zero. Why do Tories never use this particular stick to hit their Labour opponents?
On balance, the Conservatives are the party of office. Whilst Labour are the party of culture. Many young women proudly claim to have never slept with a Tory on their online dating profiles (the reverse is never seen) and Labour always sets the terms of public discourse, this even in the wake of a sound electoral defeat. I’ve seen many vandalised ‘Vote Conservative’ signs, and many Tory voters will publicly claim to vote Labour to avoid ridicule. No one ever feels compelled to falsey claim the blue team.
This new scandal is yet another example of the British public’s hypocrisy. As if they don’t watch porn!
“What a miraculous metamorphosis from the days of Disraeli and Gladstone.”
How I would like to believe that this was true! Then it might be possible to return to that Elysian Field. But I fear that we do not and cannot know whether the olden days were as golden as you paint them. I further fear that human-kind was just as fallible then as it is now, and that the same applies on the Left as it does on the Right; in the East, as in the West; in the North, as in the South. Prove me wrong if you can!
Mankind has always been fallible, and no golden age has ever existed. But the level of our MPs and government officials was much higher in the past than it is now. One doesn’t see any equivalents of the Rockingham Whigs in today’s parliament. Just compare Edmund Burke with Angela Rayner — or Dowden, if you’d rather. Or, closer to our time, take the Tory cabinet from the 30s, then look at ours today and weep.
Surely the same applies? It is a matter of perspective. We deceive ourselves that former days were better (in some ways) but it cannot be proved no matter how much we may kid ourselves.
Surely with the old charm and good looks that dressing room trickery was wholly unnecessary?
And God bless you too.