The news that the US Supreme Court has overturned Roe v. Wade has divided opinion. Here is our first debate piece on the issue: we have two different views from two different young women about the issue.
Pro-Choice:
Olivia Lever is the director of Blue Beyond. You can follow her at @liv_lever on Twitter:
‘I feel very annoyed and frustrated. A woman should have the right to choose in the 2022, and the state should never have interference over a woman’s body – it is very similar to the vaccine debate, the state should have no say in what you do with your body. In a practical sense, sex education and social infrastructure in the States is very poor.
On a post note, there is no mention of social infrastructure being made better to help those that have to have babies not be struck down by the financial burden or making sure that these children don’t have less of a life than they should. The whole thing is so poorly thought out, plus the US is supposed to be secular. It’s the constitutional principle. We could lose same-sex marriage and gay marriage. It’s stupid to lose contraception seeing as it prevents abortion.’
Pro-Life:
@BeatriceSEM takes the opposite view:
‘Absolutely delighted and feeling pretty emotional. The number of babies who will now be given a chance at life is massive! I hope very much other countries follow suit!’
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One Simple Way to Fix the Government
Sorry, not this government. The idea of proportional representation seems to be fluttering about, but you don’t even need to go that far. There’s a much simpler solution which doesn’t rely on changing the electoral system. Even better, all you have to do is lean into existing political expectations. And, well, it’s not so much one simple way to fix the government. First comes the political party, which then becomes the government.
Solution
Put party appointments, candidates, and occupants of elected positions under the direct and total command of the party leader. Yes. Run the party like a company, military unit, the mafia, etc. whatever comparison works for you. In other words, like any group organised to actually achieve a common purpose in the face of external pressures.
But what about party members?
Shouldn’t the members have a say? No. At least not the way they do now. It’s better that way. They’ll come around when their party wins.
Party members don’t really have much, if any, of a say in party matters as it is. Whether it’s council, parliamentary, or leadership candidates, there’s quite a lot of filtering which goes on before they are presented to members. At the lower level, staggeringly few party members vote on internal party association positions, or even council candidates, so there’s no real loss there. At the higher levels, in the Conservative Party, for example, Kemi Badenoch was the most popular choice for leadership this time around, among the members, before MPs filtered her out and narrowed the field to Truss and Sunak. Now it looks like the party isn’t even really getting Truss. (A lot of that is her fault to be fair).
As a party member, what exactly are you losing by not getting a say? Even after all that, you were almost certainly going to vote for the party anyway, so what are you even complaining about? Isn’t it more important to get behind those who reflect your principles, or back who you think is the best shot, etc. rather than “having a say” exactly?
The reason you want a say isn’t that you want power, exactly, it’s that you want to feel like you matter. Trying to get thousands of cooks to meddle in the broth isn’t the way to matter. When you identify the leader and plan that you want to back, fall in line, and follow their lead. As part of the masses, you have a very small amount of individual energy. If you want it to do anything, it needs to be focused like a laser. Let yourself be focused.
Success happens when there’s a plan and everyone sticks to it. It doesn’t happen when everyone starts fighting over their own ideas. Make the party leader ultimately responsible not just for their plan but for all the resources and people they will need to execute it. That means party members do not get a say. Party members must be rewarded in other ways, but that’s a topic for another piece.
Loyalty
There is one aspect of party candidate selection which is worth keeping: loyalty. The selection process today selects for loyalty above all else, to the party, and to nebulous groups of insiders within the party itself.
Loyalty is important. You need everyone to act as one, working to the same goal, with the same ethos, presenting a strong, united front. The leader at the top should have a plan and will need loyal people to get it done. Make it obvious where that loyalty is going to – to the leader – rather than vaguely to the party, which really means planless, disorganised, venal, behind-the-sceners.
Members don’t really have a say as it is. When it comes to it, most don’t seem to mind and vote for the party in elections anyway. Activists keep knocking on doors, delivering leaflets, donating, etc. Lean into that political reality, clear up the leadership structure, and, even better, make it much more honest by showing plainly where that loyalty really goes.
Just in that regard, putting everyone under the direct and total responsibility of the party leader would make everything better for the candidates, party activists, and the party as a whole.
For candidates, they don’t need to waste time with the chaos and pettiness of the local party and activists. They don’t need to waste untold hours doing pointless tasks to prove their loyalty. If they owe their position entirely to the party leader, that’s where you get the loyalty. Remove some big obstacles to getting the best candidates 1) the time they have to spend doing politics instead of whatever highly demanding civilian job they have, and 2) the risk of not getting selected even after all the loyalty-proving they have to go through.
Do you want better politicians? Make it easier for the better ones to put themselves forward.
For the party leader, the benefits are obvious. He squashes the potential for distraction and dissent, potential rivals from within his own camp, and gets to act much more pragmatically.
This all increases the chances of winning. You like winning, don’t you?
What If It All Goes Wrong?
If the leader turns out not to be a winner, at least it’s totally clear where the problem is – the leader. If the party can only go where the leader does, and the party fails, you know what to do. This makes it much easier to cut your losses, move on, and try again with someone else in a new party.
This criticism is more or less a criticism of the status quo anyway. When party leaders don’t work out, the leaders change. Often the party as a whole changes, merely the branding stays familiar. How many of you have asked whether the Conservative or Labour Parties are really Conservative or really Labour?
What’s the difference, practically, between junking an entire party with its leader and starting again fresh, and more honestly?
Better Government
If you were reading closely enough, you noticed that the solution included total responsibility over those in elected positions.
Let’s face it, people don’t really elect the individual MP. They vote by party or leader. Lean into that political expectation. Use it to clear up and prevent parliament becoming whatever it is now. Stuffed full of has-beens, inadequates, and failures, many occupying “safe seats”.
The party leader should be able to fire and hire as they see fit to the parliamentary seats they/their party has already won. Accepting this should be a condition of candidacy in the first place. It could even be the first law the party passes.
The ability to replace bad MPs might keep them good for longer and allow for a proper cycle of “tested and done” out for “promising and new”. For example; what is the point of Matt Hancock? He’s just blocking someone potentially useful, or at least someone who is not a net negative. Let’s be real, nobody voted for Matt Hancock. Come on. Why wait around? Fire him and get someone else.
Spent losers hanging on is one of the reasons the Conservative Party today is having so much trouble. It happened to the Labour Party too in the dying days of the Gordon Brown government too. Too many MPs hanging around long past their usefulness. It diminishes the pool of potential ministers.
Before you know it, we’re all pretending that Dehenna Davison is a minister who actually does any governing.
The Party Leader
Command over all party appointments, candidates, etc. would include the party leader himself.
No party leadership elections. Most people vote by party or for a party leader, presidential style. Lean into that. Spare everyone the mixed and mashed chaos of whatever normally goes on in the background of party politics. Spare everyone the same mixed and mashed chaos of what goes on in the foreground of party politics!
But isn’t it a problem if you can’t remove a leader from the party? No. Just back the leader you want in a new party. It doesn’t really matter if someone can’t be removed as leader in a party if everyone leaves to do something different. Just look at UKIP/Nigel Farage/the Brexit Party. And now Reform UK or whatever the Brexit Party rebranded as.
The solution for fixing the government
In summary: there’s a leader, a plan, their team, who they will hire and fire to get the job done, and do you want it or not? If yes, you have a structure which might actually be able to get something done. If not, don’t vote for it, and from your perspective, nothing is lost. Simple.
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The Burkean Dilemma – and The Need for Constitutional Vandalism
Cast your mind back to your infantile beginnings on the internet – do you remember when a mix of teenage dissent and good taste brought you upon hours and hours of Peter Hitchens clips? The talking points remain engraved in my brain at least. Scorning Elizabeth Truss for being a Liberal Democrat, lamenting the decline, smugly enjoying being the most right-wing man in the room; these old YouTube clips are foundational for many of us. It is through this canon that many reading, I’m sure, found themselves on the Right. Thereby the ideology of Hitchens and the most searing of his convictions have necessarily branded our convictions – and made sour many aspects of reformation.
Ironically, the Burkean is a Tory in its most visceral, honest conception. There is no mistaking the conservatism of this sort, it conserves – it is the noun made verb with very little impurities included. You know the lines, ask why the fence is there before you knock it down. You know the policies, maintain the Lords, maintain the Monarchy, maintain above all; the Constitution.
The Constitution of England is a truly beautiful phenomena; it is our unique testament unto this world. No other people over millennia could produce such a sprawling web of good governance and sound law. Furthermore, the fact it was never sat down and written, but came forth from our historical experiences over a thousand years further adds to its splendour. Through the test of time, it has not only secured this nation but irrigated the unique liberties afforded within it.
It is the Constitution, and adoration for it, that makes a Tory. These sentiments are in-born, and felt from a young age before one has even been acquainted with the exacts of the Constitution. Hence, Enoch Powell as a young boy would take off his cap entering the chamber wherein the first Prince of Wales was born. Such a thing is but second nature to an inherently Tory character, it is an inseparable feature of their character to revere what has come before them – thereby their politics becomes a ritual of removing one’s cap and bowing.
It is natural then that not just a principled opposition but a genuine disgust is exhibited when the foundations of our governance and law are tinkered with. It is felt that to damage the beams built over thousands of years that have maintained Britain’s Constitution is to risk a cave falling in on itself, and a millennia’s effort being destroyed in the process. Therein, the Tory is daunted to even mutter the name Blair.
Removing privileges of the Lords and creating an American-style Supreme Court would likely have been enough to make Enoch Powell croak ten times over – and to this day continues to drive Peter Hitchens into the ground, and it’s clear to see why. The whole Blairite infrastructure continues to allow the spectre of New Labour to linger endlessly. Almost any attempt to combat mass immigration is smashed by some grotesque machination of an early 2000s civil servant.
We have been shown time and time again that the subversive elements of our political class have no regard for these ancient precepts. It is no vice to bend the very structure of this nation in order to inject Liberalism through it. It is for this reason, that we on the Right find ourselves within a Burkean dilemma.
Our base instincts warn us against any constitutional reform. Whether we even express this fact outwardly, this feeling that what has worked for millennia should not be fiddled with is, as mentioned, a petit-pathology of ours. However, if we are to combat a force willing to bend these rules, then we doom ourselves if we do not adapt to this landscape. There is no virtue in taking off our caps to a nation in flames, safe in the knowledge that it was the good timber set alight.
The Blair Cabal was willing to entrench a vapid, corrosive anarcho-tyranny within the fabric of this country, and Starmer will only bolster it as he takes up the torch. On these matters, we must unfortunately get our hands dirty.
Let us use the debate regarding first-past-the-post as an example. Our nature appreciates this institution, it works reasonably well and has done since we thought voting would be a jolly good idea. However, as the Tories and Labour are both infected with the corrosive modernity of our day – what good is the thing? Reform, despite their best efforts, poll in some indications third in terms of vote share, yet are projected to gain not a single seat. The classic UKIP effect, a deliberate design of our voting system to ensure that radical sorts and ruffians can’t steer us on a path of destruction whenever a good demagogue comes about. This is a sound principle . . . when England was a nation of civil, well-mannered people. Hitchens reminds us – ‘there is an inch between Labour and the Conservatives, but it is within that inch we all live.’ This principle rings true when the key debates of a society concern marginal tax rates and the exacts of social spending. It rings a tone of death for a nation embroiled in the debates of our day.
This constitution of ours is unique to us. It could not have come about among any other people, no other nation has matched our wonderful system of civil existence, and those that came close certainly did not happen upon it as we did. The English Constitution is nothing without the Englishman, thereby if the Englishman be doomed then so be his systems of governance and law.
If we can determine that the threats that face us are existential, then the truth of the matter is we must bite the bullet and do away with some of these constitutional features. What good is maintaining first-past-the-post if we are to be a minority within our own homeland by the middle of this century? Why would some among us sooner see the passing of the Englishman than the reformation of what he has produced?
It is the nature of our folk that produced these things; if we lose our nation we lose everything. If some of our dearest institutions must be cleared out it is a price worth paying for our survival. If a fence in the forest impedes us, we have no time to consult a passerby on the reason for its presence when behind us a bear looms.
The Burkean dilemma is this – the Constitution or England. First-past-the-post or our survival. The House of Lords or English children with a future to look forward to?
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Tavistock: Not the Victory the Right Thinks It Is
Shutting down Tavistock gender clinic is not the victory the Right thinks it is.
When it was announced on Thursday that the NHS will be shutting down a children’s gender identity development service (not a noun I ever thought I would use), the Sophie Corcorans of the world jumped onto Twitter claiming this as a victory in keeping children away from trans ideology. However, what those so keen to jump on the celebratory bandwagon fail to recognise is that the reason that this clinic is being shut down is not because it was over-providing its services, but the fact that it was seen to be under-providing them.
While there have been some concerns raised about the overdiagnosis of gender dysphoria, the main reason for the service being shut down has been due to concerns of under provision. The number of referrals to gender specialists across the country has increased from around 140 in 2010, to around 2,300 in 2020. Whereas in the past gender dysphoria mostly affected men who believed themselves to be women, the inverse is now true, and much of the additional referrals come from teenage girls; the same group who are targeted by all others who seek to create a groupthink craze. These stretch from the relatively harmless, like One Direction fans back in the day, to the magazines promoting anorexia in the 90’s – and in the true spirit of throwing the baby out with the bathwater – the same publications now using Tess Holloway to promote ‘health at any size’.
Because of the immense increase in referrals, waiting times to be seen at Tavistock are now five years. According to Hillary Cass, who was tasked with reviewing the service and writing a report which was published this spring, the service was under ‘unsustainable pressure’, with the long wait times causing patients considerable ‘distress’ and ‘declining mental health’. While the right picked up the quote that the clinic was ‘not safe’ for children, they failed to see that the reason this was claimed is that their supposed needs were being ignored, as opposed to being sated.
What this argument seems to ignore is that long wait times are good and necessary when dealing with children with no medically urgent needs. Given the number of young adults seeking to de-transition (aka reverse the alterations done to their bodies during their adolescence), forcing those seeking such services to have a long wait period to consider the permanence and impact of such a decision is an entirely sensible policy. In accordance with the government’s focus on levelling up, a new network of ‘regional hubs’ is being planned to replace Tavistock, despite the fact that for someone in Birmingham or Manchester seeking such a service, the need to make a trip to London may make them consider whether or not their reasons for doing so are legitimate.
However, the long wait times that have been tacit government policy for decades (and quite successfully, given the negligible numbers of de-transitions until very recently) are now being undermined by private providers with even fewer scruples than the NHS. Given that upper middle-class children of guardian-reading intellectuals are most likely to want to transition in the first place, there has been an increase in private provision of cross sex hormones and surgery, as well as an increase in people going abroad for cheaper surgeries. In order to gain the Brownie points of ‘supporting their trans child’, the parents will do whatever is necessary to fast-track their child’s transition without giving them the chance to change their mind.
In conclusion, shutting down Tavistock is not a victory for conservatives but a loss. The ideologically driven medicine that was once contained in London for those determined enough to make the journey will now be spread out across the country in order to reach more and more children. If the government keeps allowing supply to grow to keep up with the supposed demand, we will end up with a generation where fewer and fewer young people have healthy bodies, and even fewer with healthy minds. However, the worst offenders in creating this contagion among young girls is TikTok and an educational culture which defines its role as helping children ‘unlearn’ their biases, as opposed to learning the realities of the world: until this changes, nothing will.
