Liz Truss obscures good ideas with distractions like banning wolf-whistles

In the Conservative leadership contest, a pattern has emerged. Liz Truss is increasingly seen as a likely reformer and innovator, Rishi Sunak as business as usual.

The Truss camp has scored a notable, possibly decisive, victory in driving Sunak to abandon his Victorian insistence on deferred gratification and enter the tax-cuts auction by pledging to scrap VAT on household energy bills. Dropping his principled stance has destroyed his credibility, while his offer to taxpayers is inferior to what Liz Truss is pledging.

But she, too, is making some miscalculations. “Liz Truss would ban wolf-whistles” is the damaging headline she generated, while trying to address some serious and urgent issues relating to the protection of women. The murder of Sarah Everard highlighted the need for action to prevent violence against women, and Liz Truss, to her credit, has devised a package of measures, including a national domestic abuse register, increased police training and faster processes for rape victims.

Unfortunately, she has undermined the credibility of these serious proposals by including an ill-defined new offence that would criminalise “aggressive and misogynistic behaviour” in the street; the public discourse that has recently taken place leaves no doubt that this terminology includes wolf-whistling and cat-calling.

Of course, any aggressive behaviour in the street that involves intimidation or physical contact must be prohibited, but such conduct is already covered by the law on assault; whistling and cat-calling are not, and rightly so.

It is infantilising women to pretend they will be seriously traumatised by a wolf-whistle; most women shrug it off, and some are amused. The loaded PC/feminist term “misogynistic” betrays the provenance of a proposed law that would further distort relations between grown-up men and women since, under judicial activism, its consequences would not stop at whistling. Any experienced police officer could tell Liz Truss that the lad on the scaffolding wolf-whistling in front of his mates is the least likely candidate to murder women, in terms of psychological profile.

This raises, yet again, the tired question: why do Tory politicians feel it necessary to embrace at least some of the woke agenda, instead of eradicating it from public life? Why are they feeding the monster that threatens to devour them? Under Margaret Thatcher, the Tories held the moral high ground: their ethic of hard work, meritocracy, and opportunity had come to be shared by the public, which rejected Labour’s culture of work-shy, sclerotic economic stasis and embraced the Thatcherite ethic.

Today, a parliamentary Conservative Party with no coherent philosophy to direct it is allowing itself to be blown along by every gust of woke extravagance. Penny Mordaunt’s insistence on woke language in legislation and the fact that the Online Safety Bill gives online platforms the ability to censor conservative comment, even if legal, as “fake news” or some similar excuse, are lamentable examples of Tories doing heavy lifting for the woke left. Why do Conservatives so routinely saw off the branch on which they are seated?

It was deference to PC preoccupations, fear of being thought “racist” or “Islamophobic”, that deterred the police and local authorities from fulfilling their duty of protection to thousands of children in Rotherham, Oxford, Rochdale, Derby, Newcastle, Huddersfield, Telford and, for all we know, other places as well. When Sarah Champion, Labour MP for Rotherham, wrote a newspaper article about Pakistani grooming gangs in her constituency, under the then Corbyn regime she lost her position as shadow equalities minister.

Why are Truss and Sunak not talking about this and plans to go through the police and local authorities like a dose of salts to eliminate a culture that left underage girls in the 20th-21st century as helpless as when a Norman baron was having his way with a serf’s daughter: a new culture of privilege – in the hypocritical name of equality and diversity – that needs to be eradicated? What have Liz and Rishi to say about that? Why have the media and Tory party members not interrogated them about it?

Or about immigration? We know that both candidates would continue the Rwanda policy. So, that takes care of 300 illegal migrants per year; so far this year, arrivals in small boats are 60 per cent up on 2021, with Border Force union officials forecasting a total of 60,000 by the end of the year.

Thanks to Rwanda, that will be just 59,700. What do the candidates propose to do about them? More to the point, what can they do, unless they withdraw from the ECHR? Promising to cut immigration while refusing to leave the ECHR is like offering flights on an aircraft with no engine.

Neither the Tory members nor the wider public is prepared to tolerate this paralysis in government any more. They look at Parliament, Whitehall, the NHS and all the institutions they once respected and see the elites babbling about “chestfeeders”, “womb-carriers” and paying homage to an ideology that contradicts science.

Crime is rampant, but police activity low-profile. In 2018-19, the last normal year before the pandemic, a majestic total of 7.8 per cent of crimes committed in England and Wales resulted in prosecutions (which is not to say convictions); but since 2014 the police have triumphantly recorded more than 120,000 “non-crime hate incidents”.

If they are not crimes, why are the police investigating them, especially since they are failing abysmally to detect actual crime? For that matter, why are the police allowed to fly a political rainbow flag over their police stations, wear rainbow insignia on their uniforms and paint it on their patrol cars? Would they wear Conservative blue rosettes as happily? The next prime minister needs to get a grip on ultra-leftist infiltration of schools, where it plays dangerous mind games with children, of universities, of the NHS and, above all, of the civil service.

It is time to reassert the principle that the political philosophy that legitimately initiates and inspires legislation, controls government and infuses its ideas throughout society, openly and in a spirit of free debate, is that of the party that wins a general election by securing the endorsement of the majority of the electorate, during the interval between one general election and another.

The public did not vote to empower woke civil servants, or virtue-signalling chief constables, or schoolteachers, or university dons, but their elected servants who form the government.

Has Liz Truss the Thatcherite steel it takes to reclaim authority from the deep state, or will she allow herself to be distracted by trivia such as wolf-whistles and so play into the hands of her political opponents? Her party should ask her.