A 75-point LGBT plan? Moses only got ten commandments!
SHADOW Home Secretary Diane Abbott was due to make a 9.30am speech on ‘Labour’s immigration policy’. Blimey, that’s ambitiously early in the day for Diane. But it was not to be. The great oration finally got going more than an hour late. Logistical reasons, cough.
Alas, I am unable to bring you an eye-witness account of this important national event, which was held in a committee room on the parliamentary estate.
An hour before it was scheduled to start, Labour spin doctors despatched notification that I and my counterpart on the Guardian newspaper that we would not be admitted. There was ‘no room’, we were told, such was the crush of citizenry keen to hear Comrade Abbott’s words. We sketchwriters were therefore excluded. Nyet vkhoda, as they say in Mr Putin’s russia, a coun- try the Corbynites so admire. No room? A news scribe from another newspaper later sent word that there had been acres of empty seats at the speech.
Every cloud has a vaporous lining and being barred from Diane’s shaky- fingered ramblings allowed me to attend Equalities Questions in the Commons. The Gettysburg Address itself would come second to a gathering of such dazzling rhetoric and philosophical moment. There are six equalities ministers in the Commons – more than they have in piffling Departments such as the Foreign Office or Treasury. These equalities ministers are devoted to such matters as transgender lavatories, paternity pay and upskirting.
A reader, Thomas Proudfoot, wrote to me this week after seeing a photograph from the latest North Korean military parade, which included a regiment of female soldiers goose- stepping in jolly skimpy outfits. No anti-upskirting laws in Pyongyang, plainly.
Yesterday’s shattering disappointment was that Equalities Secretary Penny Mordaunt, a woman sometimes spoken of as a replacement for useless Mrs May, failed to turn up for the session.
HER absence caused a commotion on the Government bench. Speaker Bercow, who takes equalities terribly seriously, scowled. Junior ministers and Whips clucked and flapped their wings and consulted their mobile telephones.
Eventually, Miss Mordaunt’s deputy, Victoria Atkins, flutingly informed the House that Miss Mordaunt ‘taked her responsilities as Equalities Minister very seriously’ but she was busy in an ‘important Cabinet meeting’.
Yet only seconds earlier we had seen and heard from another Cabinet minister, Liam Fox. He had managed to get away from Cabinet. Perhaps Miss Mordaunt simply couldn’t be fagged with equalities questions.
Who could blame her? During a drawn- out discussion of shared parental leave, Miss Atkins started speaking about ‘evidence based tools for employees’. ‘It’s all about cultural change,’ she jawed.
We moved to other gender issues – ‘reporting processes on the gender pay gap’, state handouts to help women travel to abortion clinics, and the ‘75-point LGBT action plan’ on which the May Government is spending almost £5million. Seventy five points? How unadventurous of Moses to settle for just ten commandments.
Miss Atkins has a manner of treating questions with such elaborate importance that she seems almost to be taking the mickey. Self-admiration bubbles not far below the surface.
Another minister, Sarah Newton, was a figure of cringing wetness, hunching her shoulders, flinging her arms here and there in nannyish concern, the voice more suitable for Jackanory than the Legislature of a soon-to-be-independent kingdom.
We got on to gay conversion therapy, gay rights in Venezuela, the treatment of ‘ pregnant persons’ (you are not allowed to talk of pregnant women because some of them might identify as chaps), and ‘ ze upskirting’, as German-born Wera Hobhouse (Lib Dem, Bath) put it.
Also the menopause. ‘ One of the advances of this parliament is that we are talking more about the menopause,’ averred Miss Atkins with an enthusiastic sweep of her elbow. To her side sat Mrs Newton, wringing hands and nodding bravely.
And some curs accuse our political and media elite of being out of touch with national concerns!