“The abolition of God necessarily leads to the abolition of man,” wrote C.S. Lewis, ever the prophet.
True enough, half a century or so later we’ve developed a knack for talking about people not as individuals but as groups.
By doing so, we’ve jumped backwards, leapfrogging two millennia of our civilisation and landing smack in the middle of the pre-Christian Greco-Roman antiquity.
Rather than rejoicing in the Christian notion of the sovereign individual, we wallow in the defacing collectivism of modernity – and love it.
Group identity has replaced individual dignity, and any personal affront is instantly taken as an assault on the group with which the target identifies, especially if the group enjoys a minority status in public perception.
Hence women, who, in defiance of maths, are supposed to be a minority, and an oppressed one at that, routinely demand – and are given – certain privileges not on merit but simply on the strength of their being women.
Having ridden their sex to a particular job, such women then erect around themselves a protective wall to ward off any insinuations about their incompetence. Like Nato’s charter stipulating that an attack on one member is an attack on all, they accuse the insinuator of misogyny, not a legitimate gripe against a certain woman but hatred of women as such.
In that spirit, since I’m about to point out the cosmic incompetence of two of our female ministers, I hasten to offer this disclaimer: neither women nor men in general are fit to govern. However, some men are, and so are some women.
It’s just that neither Nicky Morgan nor Helen Grant is, and they both happen to have ministerial portfolios, for Equality (along with Education) and Sport respectively.
Helen is grievously hurt by the observation that some professional women athletes get paid less than their male counterparts.
As if setting out to vindicate my belief that the world has gone mad, she’s particularly upset about the gross discrimination suffered by female footballers. These ball-kickers, she claims, should be paid as much as the men.
This raises many questions, not least those about Miss Grant’s professional competence.
For example, which male footballers should be used as the standard to follow? We have in England four professional leagues: the Premiership, the Championship, the First and the Second Divisions.
The average salary in the Premiership is roughly eight times higher than in the Championship. In the Championship Division it’s three times higher than in the First, which in turn towers over the Second by a factor of two.
The same goes for those teams’ managers. Those working in the top flight typically get about £3,000,000 a year, as opposed to something like £50,000 in the Second division.
Presumably Miss Grant sets her sight stratospherically high, seeing in her myopic mind’s eye female strikers earning as much as Rooney or Costa. This brings to mind a purely commercial question.
Apart from the generosity of billionaire owners, football revenues come from ticket sales, TV income, kit sales and endorsements. Comparing, say, the FA Cup Final with a similar women’s competition, which do you think will be more commercially virile?
Don’t answer that. Instead answer another question: how can someone capable of uttering such stupid, ideologically driven statements be trusted with running the country? On second thoughts, don’t bother with that one either: there is no good answer.
Front-bencher Nicky Morgan was one of 161 MPs who opposed the legalisation of homomarriage in 2013, thereby defying her party leader Dave.
However, she has since changed her mind. If the vote were held today, Miss Morgan says, she “probably would” vote in favour. She now welcomes “anybody who enters into a commitment”.
Since she didn’t qualify the statement in any way, one could infer that she’d welcome marital commitment between mother and son or brother and sister. But let’s not indulge in such reductio ad absurdum.
Instead let’s wonder what has happened in the intervening year to make Miss Morgan change her mind.
Actually, there was no change. What passes for Miss Morgan’s heart was even then firmly on the side of Dave and all those who helped him push that subversive bill through Parliament.
However, she went against her deeply held convictions because her constituents were asking her to oppose the bill “by ten to one”. This is how Miss Morgan explains the decision-making process in a style that’s rather lamentable in someone who holds the Education portfolio to augment the Equality one:
“We are all, as Members of Parliament, here to represent, to listen, to hear, to change minds but I have a lot of constituents who asked me to vote in a particular way and I listened to them and it was an issue of conscience too.”
Leaving aside the disputable claim to possessing a conscience, one has to say that, for an Education Minister or simply a halfway educated person, Miss Morgan has little idea about her parliamentary responsibilities or indeed our constitution.
On the off chance that she’s one of the few politicians who ever read books, perhaps one could recommend she acquaint herself with the writings of Edmund Burke, who knew a thing or two about constitutional matters.
An MP, wrote Burke, should be the people’s representative, not their delegate. As such, his vote should reflect not his constituents’ wishes but their interests – whatever he judges those to be.
The underlying assumption was that voters sent to Parliament those they trusted to represent their interests, even if these diverged from their wishes. In his turn, an MP felt free to vote according to his conscience, a freedom that had been vouchsafed to him by the electorate.
Hence, if Miss Morgan’s conscience called for a vote in favour of that perverse legislation, she presumably felt that the law would be in the interests of the community she represented.
Hence, by acting on the voters’ wishes rather than their interests, she effectively betrayed their trust – not to mention the constitution of this country.
Sorry about indulging in such subtleties. They have no place in a nation governed by a parliament stuffed to the gunwales with self-serving, intellectually inadequate, morally corrupt nonentities.
Both male and female.