BY ALEX STORY
Our institutions have ditched sanity and reason.
Their official mandates are no longer a priority.
Theirs now is the destructive ideology of Gender and Biology.
Every nook and cranny of the State, including our three main political parties, drip with this intellectual poison. Having thrown clarity out of the window, they sell confusion. And they do so with the conviction of converts, with an unwavering sanctimony that brooks no dissent. Submission is what they seek, not discussion – regardless of how incredible their claims are.
The speed with which this virus has spread has left many of us bewildered.
The Bank of England, no less, wrote that “people of any gender identity can be pregnant” and referred to women as “birthing people” in its 2022 submission to Stonewall, a lobby group for “Trans-rights”. With Inflation hovering over 8%, having skyrocketed to over 10% a year ago, one would have thought the Bank of England might have had other priorities.
A little over a year ago, Andrew Bailey, the Governor of the Bank of England, was good enough to tell the Parliamentary Treasury Select Committee as inflation was heading for a 21st century high that the Bank was “helpless” in the face of inflation. Helpless in the face of inflation but helpful in the face of Gender politics. His mandate and that of his institution is to keep inflation at the 2% mark. No one has asked him to opine, or take sides, on absurd neo-Marxist philosophies that reject any notion of reality, common sense, science, history, or morality. And yet, having failed at delivering on its official mandate, he and his institutions felt Pride in entering the fray on this unfortunate topic. He and his colleagues were not laughed out of court, as should have been expected. To the contrary, they know that their submission to this extreme, and derided, belief acts as an insurance policy: their careers are safe, regardless of performance or competence.
Other institutions have crossed this Rubicon. The United Kingdom Armed forces have also strayed. Once in the business of national defence, that once august institution is fully committed to its own destruction. An army can neither recruit nor operate on the basis of insanity. And a country without a solid defence cannot long survive. Yet, recently, we heard that Dr Wright, a colonel, was forced to quit the Army for saying that “men cannot be women”. Two minutes ago, this comment would have been deemed an inelegant tautology. However, a junior officer promptly warned him that his gender-critical views could be at odds with Ministry of Defence transgender policies. A formal Army investigation was opened in May 2023. He left the army six years before time having led a team of 60 troops in 306 Hospital Support Regiment alongside working as an NHS intensive care consultant.
The Royal Air Force found itself in the middle of a recruitment controversy as well.
In an email dated Jan 19, 2021, Squadron Leader Andrew Harwin, who worked in the Officer and Aircrew Selection Centre, wrote: “I noted that the boards have recently been predominantly white male heavy”.
He added “if we don’t have enough BAME and female to board then we need to make the decision to pause boarding and seek more BAME and female from the RAF”.
He went on: “I don’t really need to see loads of useless white male pilots”
Battle of Britain heroes must be turning in their graves. The Bank of England talks of “Birthing Persons”. The Army puts pressure on experienced officers to deny that “men cannot be women”. Recruitment officers at the Royal Airforce wrote their preference for recruits based on race and gender, not merit. All this to please Stonewall, a lobby group, with an influence totally out of kilter with its tiny membership. All three organisations seem happy to sacrifice their credibility and operational excellence on the altar of what can only be described as a cult.
The dangers go way beyond the messages that leak here and there out of our state sector ideologues. Up North, the Yorkshire Building Society recently closed the bank account of Reverend Fothergill, of Windermere, Cumbria, a retired vicar. He says he wrote a polite rebuttal of transgenderism in response to material on Yorkshire Building Society’s website. This, for the Building Society was a Bridge Too Far. In response, the building society wrote, unashamedly, to the beleaguered reverend that it had ‘a zero tolerance approach to discrimination’, thereby justifying the closure of his account.
In short, state institutions and the corporate sector are allies in a process of forced submission to an ideology that makes no claim to intellectual elegance or rationality. It demands total surrender and thoughtless compliance. To disagree with this new orthodoxy is to court a public and private dehumanisation process. Having no intellectual solidity, the only tool at their disposal is the one bullies have always used: intimidation. If we keep going down that path, a bleak and joyless future awaits. There can be no happy ending for individuals or nations in submitting to a philosophy that has run away from reason only to jump, shouting inanities, over the cliff.
Alex Story is Head of Business Development at a City broker working with Hedge Funds and other financial institutions. He stood for parliament in 2005, 2010 and 2015. In 2016, he won the right to represent Yorkshire & the Humber in the European Parliament. He didn’t take the seat.