What you or I think about trans issues isn’t the point here at all – rather, what in buggery is the National Lottery doing funding political propaganda on any issue? For that is what is being done here, the skim off mug punters’ hopes of hot and cold running Ferraris is being spent on media agitation over woke issues. Which isn’t quite what any of us thought those good causes were going to be although anyone with a properly cynical knowledge of politics would have been able to predict it. It’s always going to be true that any similarly gargantuan pot of money will be coopted by the fashionable nostrums of the time:
[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””] The national lottery was last night accused of breaking its ban on political funding after giving a large grant to a second controversial transgender lobbying group. The Big Lottery Fund (BLF) will pay £494,000 to “empower trans leaders and organisations” in “facilitation, media and influencing”. The money is being handed to the advocacy group Stonewall for distribution to other activists, creating a “network of leaders” to lobby for change. Stonewall was central to the campaign for contentious changes to gender laws. Last week The Sunday Times revealed the lottery had awarded £500,000 to the trans advocacy group Mermaids, which campaigns for children to be allowed prohibited sex-change hormones. More large sums to trans lobbyists are thought to be in the pipeline. [/perfectpullquote]No, this isn’t about whether kids should have genitals chopped off or constructed for them – we don’t do surgery on kiddies anyway, puberty blocking drugs are about as far as it goes. It’s also not about trans rights either – we’re liberals around here and frock dress or frock coat is something entirely up to the individual. We might even be polite, if we’re feeling like it, and use your pronoun of choice.
But why this skim for propaganda?
The impression people have of the good causes diversion of lottery profits is that it’ll go to, say, Guide Dogs for the Blind. And if it does then it will be spent upon training guide dogs for the blind, not on lobbying politicians to be aware of the speciest societal reluctance to try to train guide cats for the deaf. It’s even true that if the lottery were paying for chop chop for those adults who desire it this would be just fine, a decent charitable cause in itself. It’s the grants of grants for lobbying, media – essentially, propaganda – which are wrong, whatever the aim or point of the mindturning.
The problem being that absolutely any such pot of cash will end up being spent in such manner. Allow the fashionable access to our cash and our cash will be spent upon fashionable issues. More, it won’t be spent upon actual things, but leveraged into an insistence that the law should be changed, that we should, to promote those fashions. That is, allow them access to our wallets and they’ll use it to propagandise to us.
Better to abolish the entire good causes part of the National Lottery, no?
The Beeb’s ‘Children in Need’ is also funding Mermaids. Another reason not to donate.