Boris Johnson’s culture-war cowardice

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As soon as it was the ‘worth of milk’ query that journalists threw at politicians within the hope of catching them out. Now it’s the ‘cervix’ query. The place as soon as MPs had been terrified about looking of contact by failing to recall how a lot a pint of semi-skimmed prices, now they’re lining as much as present how out of contact they’re by pretending to consider that each women and men can have a cervix.

Labour chief Keir Starmer stated final week that it was unsuitable to say that ‘solely girls have a cervix’. He was responding to the case of Rosie Duffield, a gender-critical Labour MP who has been threatened by trans activists for daring to mouth that terrible heresy. Final week, shadow ministers tied themselves in knots, one after one other, as they tried to keep away from saying what everyone knows to be true.

This week, it was Boris Johnson’s flip to squirm, as he did the media rounds for Tory Occasion convention. You may count on the prime minister to have a straight reply to the cervix query. In any case, he’s apparently hell-bent on stoking a ‘tradition warfare’, if the liberal press is to be believed. Nevertheless it didn’t pan out like that. ‘Biology is vital, however…’ was Johnson’s mealy mouthed response.

Right here we see what has been clear for a while – that the prime minister is just not a lot stoking the tradition warfare as he’s bottling out of it. Regardless of nodding to cancel tradition, and the identitarian vogue for toppling statues, in his convention speech, Johnson is outwardly scared of difficult woke orthodoxies. Even those who contradict easy organic information.

With anti-woke warriors like these, who wants the opposite lot?

Fraser Myers is deputy editor at spiked and host of the spiked podcast. Comply with him on Twitter: @FraserMyers.