Society

The age of majority would be returned to 21 years for all legal matters and for voting.  Poor quality education has resulted in all too many youngsters being too ignorant of history and common sense to exercise mature judgement on important matters.  Many children leave school with an inadequate command of arithmetic, unable to write legibly, and hardly able to speak or write English properly.  How can young people be expected to make adult decisions when so poorly-equipped?

The tyranny of so-called ‘health and safety’ would end and the agency responsible wound up.  Thereafter, the matters currently dealt with by the agency would be left up to insurance companies and common sense.

So-called ‘social services’ would lose the power to abduct children without having first demonstrated to a judge and jury that a child was clearly in danger.  Said judges and juries would be organised in advance to be available in emergency cases.  All other activities of social services departments would be reevaluated for their value or necessity.

The Charity Commission, that great enemy of charity, would be wound up and replaced by a voluntary organisation run by the charities themselves. The British are a very charitable people.  They don’t need arrogant, authoritarian bureaucrats telling them how to behave.  Any fraudulent ‘charities’ would be dealt with under ordinary laws against fraud and theft.

Any State involvement in, or subsidisation of, sport would end.

Under a CORE government people would naturally be free to wear whatever clothes they liked.  However, it would be enshrined in law that any business owner or owners would be equally free to deny admittance to persons  whose faces are concealed.  Veils have already been used as disguises in the commission of crimes, so it plain common sense for the owners of shops, malls, markets, department stores and theatres, or the operators of taxis, buses, trains, ferries or aeroplanes, to refuse entry when faces are invisible.  Should they welcome people wearing balaclavas?

Businesses, including pubs and restaurants, would be free to set up well-ventilated smoking areas indoors, as long as these were isolated from non-smoking areas.

Sellers of fruit and vegetables, other comestibles, and makers of consumer goods, would be free to sell produce and products in former Imperial measures if they so choose.  Insurers would validate scales and measures.

A statute of limitations would be introduced for sexual offences.  Parents will be encouraged to explain matters to their children and, when or if an offence occurs, to tell children to report it immediately to parent, school or police.  Unfortunately, such offences do occur but they should be dealt with quickly.  The spectacle of old men being persecuted for alleged misbehaviour decades previously is a disgrace to reason and justice.  Human memories become notoriously inaccurate or suspect with the passage of time and it is a sordid but well-known fact that some people are willing to tailor or embroider incidents from long ago in order to climb on compensation bandwagons.

Obviously, leniency would be balanced by proper restitution where cases can be clearly proven, particularly where children are involved.  Children are neither physically, mentally nor emotionally equipped for sexual activity.  Adults who seek sexual gratification with minors are plainly mentally ill.  They should be required to undergo psychotherapy, and to pay compensation if need be, rather than be incarcerated.

Irrational or intrusive aspects of the Equalities Act would be repealed.  For example, the absurd requirement that adoption agencies give children to homosexuals; the equally absurd demand that all buildings have wheelchair access, or the tyrannical insistence that B&Bs admit same-sex couples regardless of the owners’ beliefs or desires.

Such couples are grown-ups and must accept that they have no right to force their lifestyles on those who may dislike or disapprove of them.  Their money is as good as anybody’s but if someone else doesn’t want to take it, so be it.  The ‘politically correct’ bigotry behind such tyrannical laws has no place in a free, decent society.

All ‘equalities’ commissions would be abolished.  People are perfectly capable of dissolving prejudices and resolving differences amongst themselves.  Laws such as the Equalities Act merely make matters worse:  “those who attempt to resolve everything by law will exacerbate not cure the evils of mankind” (Spinoza).

The BBC would be given to those holding current TV licenses and would become responsible for funding itself.  TV licensing would end.

The Online Safety Bill would be revamped or repealed.  In all probability it is not necessary, merely serving some particular interests and people who don’t like being criticised.  Basically, it is censorship by the back door.

The prison populations would be evaluated.  Convicted thieves would be offered release if they agreed to reimburse and compensate their victims.  They would also be required to swear in public that they will never steal again. Similar offers would be made to other categories of prisoner.  Conjugal visits would be allowed – except for those convicted of rape.

“Male and female created He them”

 Like all animal species, humanity is composed of two complementary halves, male and female, arrived at via evolution over countless eras as the most effective means for the procreation of a species.  Thus, there are only two sexes:  each human is born either a boy or a girl and grows into a man or a woman.  The above is irrefutable, objective, biological fact – which in normal times shouldn’t need stating.  The notion that gender is a spectrum, or a range of variables, is patent nonsense.

Alas, these are not normal times.  An intellectual trend called ‘transgenderism’ has arisen, underpinned at its distant root by the totally mistaken Kantian belief that human minds create rather than perceive reality.  Numbers of people now believe that it is possible to change their sex.  Unfortunately, the trend has been latched onto by a small group of fanatics who have persuaded a scattering of young people, and some deluded adults, that the not uncommon youthful fantasy, ‘I wish I was a boy/girl,’ could be made real – by dress, by self-identification, through hormonal medication, or by surgery.

This is blatantly false.  In the first place, such fancies are usually short lived.  Second, male and female bodies differ radically – not merely in their genitalia – differences made obvious when biologically male ‘transgender’ athletes compete in female sporting categories.  Claims to ‘identify’ as a member of the opposite sex are meaningless, and are usually put forward by persons of lesser talent who seek the glory of winning by pretending to be from the opposite gender.  It is related to the practices of the former communist regimes who developed Olympic doping.  In other words, it is just plain cheating.

There does indeed exist a genuine psychological problem (or so we are told) that is called ‘gender dysphoria’ – the conviction that one is a member of the opposite sex – but this is a very rare mental health disorder, a serious delusion, akin to believing that one is God, a giraffe or a gooseberry.

The Confederation and Reform Party would strive to make the truth fully known and would actively oppose any person or group of people who tried to promote ‘transgenderism.’

Under a CORE government, as long as the State was involved in medicine, ‘sexual reassignment’ surgery would be forbidden in NHS hospitals.  CORE would further press for any surgeons or doctors outside the NHS who engaged in such operations, or prescribed drug treatments with the same intent, to be struck off the medical register.

From the time of the Ancient Greek Hippocrates – during some twenty-five hundred years – doctors have abided by a medical oath:  ‘first do no harm.’  There has never been a clearer breach of that oath than ‘sexual reassignment.’