Why are the Conservatives imposing an oppressive woke law?

The revolt last weekend by Tory backbenchers and Sunday’s concerned Telegraph leader provided a timely warning shot across the bows of a Conservative leadership steering in diametrically the wrong direction. Having adopted socialist fiscal policies, the Johnson government is now also imposing an extreme “woke” legislative agenda. Its proposed new legislation to “ban conversion therapy”, the cause of the backbench backlash and the Telegraph’s concern, is a Trojan horse.

The government claims that the law will still allow people over 18 years of age to undergo sexual conversion therapy voluntarily and will not criminalise prayer directed at conversion – both violently opposed by those demanding a total ban, disregarding the right of every adult to seek medical or psychiatric assistance of any kind in a free society. But that is not what this initiative is about: the real purpose of the proposed legislation is covertly to introduce into UK law the deeply flawed concept of “gender identity”. 

The new law could criminalise conversations between parents, clinicians and teachers with children who claim to be transgender. Any clinician who did anything other than affirm the patient’s claimed “gender identity” – which is hardly the purpose of professional therapy – could be prosecuted. More broadly, the recognition of the wholly subjective notion of “gender identity” in UK law would spell the end for all single-sex spaces, to the grave disadvantage of women. The people who prate endlessly about “safe spaces” are striving to make women unsafe in a multiplicity of venues, from lavatories to prisons.

The government’s perfunctory consultation process on this legislation – some campaign groups objected to any consultation at all, which speaks volumes about their intentions – ends this week. It must be extended and searching scrutiny brought to bear on this dangerous initiative. The agency promoting it is Stonewall, whose extravagant demands on behalf of “trans” rights place huge pressure and even the threat of criminalisation on the rest of the community.

Stonewall is a homosexual lobby organisation that nowadays seems to have little to do with homosexuals, in fact it is at war with a significant proportion of lesbians and is attacking women’s rights everywhere. Its chief preoccupation is promotion of the “gender identity” cause, which is in direct conflict with science. Around the developed world so-called “progressive” forces are championing the “trans” crusade, for an obvious reason: if they succeed in imposing their prejudices upon the whole of society, then ideology will have displaced science, making it supreme. That is a totalitarian mentality.

Commentators have expressed surprise at the growing number of organisations cutting ties with Stonewall; but the real cause for comment should be the inappropriate character of so many of the institutions that have been linked to a political lobbying organisation: the BBC, Ofsted, the Department of Health, the Cabinet Office and many other government departments. As is now obvious, unelected Stonewall has been influencing the government’s legislative agenda and has been in the outrageous position of being paid by the government, with taxpayers’ money, to lobby it. If any critic is looking for a real lobbying scandal, this is it.

The legislation that would import “gender identity” into UK law, with devastating consequences for women, was announced by the Prime Minister’s (unelected) wife at the Conservative conference. What has happened to the constitutional proprieties? Who is running this government? And why are Conservatives promoting a repressive woke agenda? Is this what the Red Wall – or most other Conservatives – voted for? The endless pressure for cranky innovations, such as attempting to replace the term “mother” – sacred in every society – with “post-natal people” or “birthing people” is the kind of unpopular imposition with which the Conservative Party is increasingly identified, not to its electoral advantage.

The most sinister feature of the situation is that Stonewall is not a unique phenomenon. Years ago, a pre-woke agenda was promoted by the organisation Common Purpose, led by a Trotskyite and with conspicuously good relations with the Cameron Conservative Party. How many senior officers in our failed police forces, recording record levels of unsolved crime while comforting life-threatening demonstrators obstructing motorways, are Common Purpose “graduates”?

It is time to cleanse public life of the scourge of lobbyists: especially the ideological manipulators. Why do all those five-straight-‘A’s and Starred Firsts in the civil service need outside agencies to direct them, at cost to the taxpayer? Who can believe the civil service is “neutral” when it is being indoctrinated by woke agencies? No informed person now laughs at the once controversial concept of the “deep state”.

We must restore direct communication and trust between voters and the government. That means a Conservative government that conserves, rather than radicalises, as David Cameron did when he arbitrarily redefined marriage and the royal succession on the back of an envelope without prior manifesto commitment or genuine consultation. Boris shows every sign of blundering down that same road. If so, he will lose all of his Red Wall voters: they live in the real world, not a campus La La Land.

The Tories should drop this legislation like a hot brick. It is designed to further the intervention of the intruder state at the heart of families and to remove the most basic rights from women. Even when women did not have the vote, they had privacy in their lavatories and dressing rooms: are the Conservatives going to regress such rights, in the interests of a far-left fantasy? 

They do not have much time to recover their senses before Richard Tice and his Reform party hold their feet to the fire and begin a similar war of attrition in marginal seats to that formerly waged by UKIP, until they secured a referendum on Europe. Red Wall voters are already cooling towards the Tories, without warming to Labour. If Conservatives cannot see the writing on the wall they will deserve their fate.