By MICHAEL BLACKBURN.

THE GOOD NEWS for the wet and wind-battered denizens of Britain is that the Labour party’s systemic mental degeneration continues to render it more certifiable each day. Having just suffered their greatest electoral defeat in 80 years they have decided the best way to make themselves more electable is to ignore all the factors that lost them votes in the first place and march courageously on. At the moment they are concentrating on matters of gender and sex – or the complete interchangeability of both, or the non-existence of either, take your pick. This, so someone back at Braindead HQ has ascertained, is a matter of paramount importance to the voters of their disintegrated Red Wall in the north and west of the country.

Lisa Nandy, one of the leadership candidates, said in a campaign meeting that she believes “fundamentally” in a person’s rights to self identify as male or female; that trans women are women and trans men are men; and that crimes committed should be recorded accordingly. This was in response to a question about whether a man who had committed multiple child rapes should be allowed to be moved to a women’s prison because he now identifies as a woman. Nandy thinks this is acceptable. She showed she isn’t entirely insane, however, by saying she did not think women who raise questions about this matter should be expelled from the Labour party.

Nandy’s colleague, Dawn Butler, added a log to the bonfire of sanities in a TV interview in which she said children were born “without sex.” In the new dispensation, biology does not exist. In which case we can confidently assume that Butler was born without a brain in her head. And, declaring her support for Labour Campaign for Trans Rights, another MP, Zarah Sultana, tweeted a clip of herself and a small group of like-minded clones jiggling campaign posters and grinning like Bedlamites.

Rebecca Long-Bailey, Labour’s other leadership contender, had already settled on her stance on the whole multivalent identity question. “Do you believe trans women are women?” asked Laura Kuenssberg a few weeks earlier. “Yes,” she replied.

So that’s that, then. The Labour establishment has thoroughly bought into the current fad. Perhaps they think their real voter base is not the ordinary and rather conservative denizens of working class towns beyond the purlieus of The Great Wen but the associated extremists, gullibles and grifters who inhabit the refined portals of the establishment.

The real question is: why are these people so obsessed with a non-issue, something that affects only a tiny percentage of the population? Why are they so keen to pander to the activists in this group that they will jetison and anathematise clearly understood and accepted definitions of human sexuality?

We could apply Occam’s Razor and say the simplest explanation is that they are not very bright. And they aren’t. In truth the general level of intelligence, experience and knowledge of our politicians across the board is decidedly lower than it has ever been. Most of them are, as Peter Hitchens said of Tony Blair, “Olympicly dim.” Labour, though, contains the largest number of wasters. There is no simile, metaphor or insult adequate enough to describe the execrable nature of Labour or the left as a whole. Andrew Marr may introduce Long-Bailey and Angela Rayner on his show as a “formidable” double bill, in apparent seriousness, but for the rest of us it’s like watching a couple of the most unfunny woke comedians promoted by the BBC.

We know that beyond the blatant idiocy of this trend is a general assault on the age old structures of society, most specifically the family and sexuality. It’s the encouragement of a mass deliquescence of identity into a slop of diversity and relativity. It’s a game of competing righteousnesses in which the loudest and most strident win. The simpletons in the political realm fall in line. They think they are leading but they are just a herd of preening helots.

Thus they have successfully transitioned themselves into a party of pathetic losers desperately grasping at any piece of ideological flotsam to keep themselves afloat. With leadership contenders like those on offer the Labour party is transitioning itself out of relevance as well as power. May they sink and never resurface.

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Currente Calamo columnist, poet and writer Michael Blackburn lives in Lincolnshire. A Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Lincoln University (2005 – 2008), his poetry has appeared in numerous publications and anthologies over the years, including Being Alive (Bloodaxe) and Something Happens, Sometimes Here (Five Leaves Press). His most recent book is Albion Days (perennisperegrinator press). Sucks to Your Revolution is a collection of his Fortnightly columns.