Rishi Sunak, trans comments: Sad move shows Britain is now irrelevant

It once ruled the world through the empire, brought about the industrial revolution that changed all our lives, gave us the Beatles, cricket and Fawlty Towers, but the UK is now a sad shell of its former self.

The writing was on the wall for me when I left the nation of my birth a decade ago.

A stagnant economy that left young people hopeless, politicians who were bereft of any vision, an entrenched class system and, of course, the dreadful weather spurred my decision to come to Australia.

I got the sense that Britain was turning inward. It was running out of ideas, becoming increasingly insular, and the political class started to blame everyone else for the nation’s problems.

Brexit was merely a symptom of the quagmire the country found itself in as it struggled desperately to find a sense of purpose since the collapse of the empire.

Its industrial economy was dismantled by the Iron Lady in the 1980s in favour of a service economy that predominantly benefited London at the expense of pretty much everywhere else in the nation.

Since the closure of coal mines and cotton mills, many towns and cities – particularly in the north – were just left to rot with no positive outlook for the future.

Labour gave the nation fresh hope in the 1990s with the arrival of baby-faced Tony Blair, but the feel-good vibes began to fizzle with the invasion of Iraq and some seriously mind-blowing financial mismanagement.

Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer under Blair, decided it would be a good idea to sell about half of the UK’s gold reserves for a fraction of what it would have been worth today. Gold back then was worth $13,700 a kilo. Today the same amount is worth $92,900.

When the Conservatives, under a coalition, took over in 2010 they were left a one-sentence letter from Labour.

It read: “Dear Chief Secretary, I’m afraid to tell you there’s no money left”.

Labour later insisted the letter was meant as a private joke, but there was nothing funny about the nation’s finances.

There still isn’t. The UK now has the second-highest debt of any nation in the world — with a staggering $13.6 trillion owed. By comparison, Australia has $2.9 trillion of debt.

It came as no surprise to me that the UK voted for Brexit. As a reporter in a town called Whitehaven in the nation’s northwest, almost everyone I spoke to said they wanted to leave the EU.

People in Whitehaven – a former coal mining town – had become demoralised as they saw their community slide into a steep decline since the 1980s. The nation was flailing and people just wanted things to change.

I have watched from afar since leaving not long after that watershed moment in the UK’s history, and it has been concerning viewing.

The Conservative party, with its revolving door of bizarre and antiquated Prime Ministers over its 13 years in charge, has led the nation absolutely nowhere.

While Australia still has an abundance of things the world wants like iron ore, rare minerals and quality food and drink, the Conservatives have offered no vision as to what will become of the UK and how it will dig itself out of its astonishing debt.

After a bumbling Covid response that saw senior Conservatives having parties and affairs while the nation was in lockdown – even hardcore Tory voters have had enough.

The party is on course for defeat at the next general election, according to opinion polls, and it is now trying to reinvent itself as a “radical” new force.

And what is the plan to revive Britain from its decades-long slide into the abyss?

Well, according to its softly-spoken nonentity Prime Minister Rishi Sunak in a speech this week, the plan is to clamp down on trans people (who make up 0.5 per cent of the UK’s population) and ban smoking. Yep, that will do it.

“We will be bold, we will be radical. We will face resistance and we will meet it,” he told delegates.

“We shouldn’t get bullied into believing that people can be any sex they want to be. They can’t. A man is a man and a woman is a woman, that’s just common sense.”

His health secretary then came out to say transgender people may be banned from single-sex hospital wards under plans to restore “common sense” in the NHS – despite the health service not receiving a single complaint about the issue. Not one.

Not only that, his party appear to be so desperate, it is resorting to spruiking insane and debunked conspiracies about 15-minute cities.

During the Conservative Party’s conference this week, Secretary of State for Transport Mark Harper told an audience that he was against “sinister” plans by local councils to “decide how often you go to the shops, and that they can ration who uses the roads and when” – in a chilling echo of online conspiratorial chatter about the policy.

This is not the ramblings of an Andrew Tate-obsessed and pimple-ridden teenage boy in his bedroom – this is the ruling party of the UK going into full lunatic mode.

The UK, which once proudly stood against the Americanisation of everything, now has its leaders putting a US-inspired culture war against already marginalised trans people at the heart of its vision for the nation.

I’m not saying there should be no debate around trans issues. Clearly there are some things to work out around women-only spaces and sports. They are important issues to talk about in a respectful way.

However, for the Prime Minister to stand up and stick the boot into a tiny minority of people as a focal point in its “radical” vision for Britain – as the nation is swallowed by crippling debt, soaring inflation and a migrant crisis – is frankly insulting to anyone’s intelligence.

Watching on from Australia, I can only hope the British public and see through this lame attempt to deflect from the real issues that face the nation.