The United Kingdom — the once-Great Britain — used to be a nation of consequence. There was a time when the Royal Navy ruled the world's oceans when Great Britain had an empire on which the sun never set. Even in 1940, after the fall of France and the Low Countries, Britain stood defiant against Hitler. There is a famous old drawing of a British soldier, his Enfield rifle in one hand, standing on a rock with ocean waves crashing at his feet; he is shaking a fist at a sky full of German airplanes, and the drawing is captioned, "Very Well — Alone."
No empire, no nation, lasts forever. But when Britain fell, they fell hard. The end of World War 2 saw the beginning of the end of the empire. Britain's huge, muscular, formerly estranged offspring, the United States, took over the role of ruling the waves, enforcing a Pax Americana on the sea lanes. Britain retreated into itself, becoming a regional power at best.
In recent years, though, the United Kingdom seems to have gone completely daffy. Case in point: Prime Minister Kier Starmer's new Health Minister, one Ashley Dalton, who is... well, read on.
Keir Starmer has promoted Ashley Dalton (as Health Minister) after sacking Andrew Gwynne from the key role over his posts in a vile WhatsApp group.
However, the PM immediately faced questions over Ms Dalton's views, as it emerged she had defended people identifying as animals and argued for all bathrooms to be gender neutral.
During a discussion on Twitter in 2016 Ms Dalton - who was elected as MP for West Lancashire in 2023 - insisted: 'Trans women aren't male. They're women.'
She also remarked: 'Personally I think we shouldn't have gendered bathrooms at all.'
Pressed on whether that applied to changing rooms, Ms Dalton said: 'Loads of places already do this with cubicles for privacy.'
Yes, you read that right: She defended people identifying as animals. Specifically, llamas.
During another Twitter exchange in 2016 Ms Dalton was asked whether people should be taken seriously if they decided they were a llama.
She replied: 'Yes. And treat you with dignity and respect.'
Setting aside for the moment the "transgender" comments — a "trans woman" is a man — the llama comment is the real head-scratcher. Sure, in a free country, free, capable adults may well engage in all manner of behavior others may find... eccentric. Believe me, plenty of people I know have, after hearing a description of our Alaskan winters, told my wife and me that we might be nuts to live here. But that's largely a matter of taste and tolerance. A person who claims to identify as a llama — that's quite a different kettle of wild-eyed fish. A person who honestly believes themselves to be a small South American camelid isn't "eccentric." They are nuts. They are cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. They are a few fries short of a happy meal. They probably shouldn't be walking around unsupervised.
Frankly, I'm not so sure about Ashley Dalton, either. In a piece in "The Telegraph," British author William Atkinson, who seems to generally have a good bead on this issue, calls Dalton PM Starmer's "maddest ministerial appointment yet."
Whilst Dalton’s stance on transgenderism might put her on the wrong side of public opinion, she is hardly out of place in a Labour Party where, until recently, its leader struggled to work out what a woman is. But in fairness to Starmer, his new minister takes her devotion to gender woo-woo to more ludicrous and embarrassing conclusions than he has ever managed.
When quizzed whether people should take someone seriously if they identify as a llama – not a habitual occurrence, I grant you, but surely not a hard one to navigate – Dalton replied: “Yes. And treat [them] with dignity and respect”.
Apparently, there is no crazy that's too crazy for the British Health Ministry. At least everyone in the United Kingdom hasn't gone bat-guano nuts; we still have JK Rowling on the side of sanity, at least on gender issues:
See Related: JK Rowling Shuts Down John Oliver for Defending Trans-Identified Males in Women's Sports
It's sad what has happened to the once-Great Britain. The United Kingdom gave rise to the United States, after all. Oh, sure, we fought a bloody revolution to kick their worst ideas out of our country; the concepts of royalty and nobility we rightly cast aside. But we kept the language, the notion of the rule of law, and a lot more. But it's a sad thing to look back at what Britain was, and what it is now — the late 20th century cost them the Empire, and it seems the 21st has cost them their sanity.
Oh, how the mighty have fallen.
