The homeless are everywhere, too numerous always to avert your guilty gaze. Often clearly mad and not long for this world, sitting downcast in total despair. Cursing your own paper-thin Christian charity, in self-disgust you step over or around them, too seldom stopping to give them money or a kind word.
They are also almost invariably men, and they are the just the most visible, wretched example of the wider crisis in masculinity. However, there is no outcry, no calls from our politicians that “Something Must Be Done”.
Meanwhile, last week we saw the advent of enforced gender reporting for firms with over 250 employees, and boy, was the sisterhood out in force. Chortling in triumphalism, as for example in this repellent article in the Telegraph by Gloria Del Piero, they sense final victory is near, and no longer bother to hide that theirs is nakedly supremacist ideology rather than one striving for justice and equality.
Why is that the case of men’s rights, so clearly evidenced by the huge and growing gender gaps in outcomes falls on deaf ears, whereas elite feminism goes from strength to strength to strength?
Piero herself gives the game away:
“In 2015, David Cameron finally recognised that if he wanted to win the women’s vote, he had to agree to our demands. It was one of my proudest moments, and it showed the power of female voices to work together.”
No movement understands better than feminism how decoupled office is from true power, and that far from every vote being equal, some votes are vastly more equal than others: women are, crucially, more likely to be the floating voters that careerist politicians court assiduously. Meanwhile, increasingly alienated from society, many men, the homeless, of course, among them, do not vote at all.
Even though Del Piero’s claim that she represents women in general is mendacious, at least she is actually elected. However, that is not in the slightest bit necessary in order to change society: imagine for a moment you are a metropolitan liberal with radical views and, of course, a belief in your innate superiority. Contemptuous of democracy, luckily for you there is simply no need for you to stand for office, win the intellectual arguments and thereby gain the agreement of the broader population: instead you can simply focus your attention on the narrow target demographics politicians are highly sensitive to, repeating your message ad nauseam until it becomes received wisdom.
This is how the Left works – and wins. Following Sun Tzu famous dictum that every battle is won before it is ever fought, the cultural ground is usually prepared assiduously through aggressively repeated media narratives, often long before the political debate proper is entered into. Feminism, of course, is an absolute master of this technique, with feminist journalists and politicians acting in perfect choreography. It simply does not matter that the gender pay gap is intellectually fraudulent, or that in our feminised society men face far greater challenges: politicians, overburdened, faced with an uphill battle and nervous of alienating those key female demographics, invariably cave and go with the flow.
The awful truth is that we do not live in a representative democracy. Instead, as Dr Spock might say: “It’s representation, Jim, but not as we know it.”
It would also be foolish to suggest there was a golden age that we can somehow return to: even in the age of universal suffrage when Parliament should have been truly representative of the British people, it proved no guardian against our entry, under false pretences, into the then European Common Market and happily enmeshed us deeper and deeper into the European quagmire with barely a whimper for over 40 years. It is no accident that the one victory for social conservatives in decades – Brexit – came about via a referendum, where every vote really was equal and the issue was intensely debated on its merits.
All the evidence shows that social conservatism will continue to lose the culture wars while Parliament, rather than the people, remains sovereign. Parliamentary sovereignty may have made sense it times of poor communications and widespread illiteracy, but that time has long been and gone. Some form of direct democracy must now be the answer.
