IN A TALK for the New Culture Forum on the gradual evolution of Magna Carta (27’19” in), David Starkey reflects briefly on the nature of English barons in the Middle Ages.
‘These,’ he observes, ‘are vigorous, bold people . . . They like fighting . . . One of the things that we’ve forgotten is an awful lot of men do just like fighting. We’re going to have to rediscover this, you know; and although it’s always nowadays denounced very shrewishly as toxic masculinity, there are all kinds of circumstances when it comes in quite handy; if you remember the chap who sort of, you know, took out single-handed the knifeman in the Dam Square, good Brit, with a very vigorous display of elegant toxic masculinity . . .’
How different from the present-day male ideal in the West!
‘The concept of masculinity is evolving,’ the AI robots at Google proclaim, ‘and today’s role models emphasise a more positive and inclusive definition, shifting away from traditional notions of strength and dominance. Modern role models often demonstrate qualities like compassion, empathy, emotional intelligence . . . They encourage men to embrace their vulnerabilities . . .’
I became consciously aware of this shift away from ‘traditional notions’ in the 1980s, when Robin of Sherwood made its appearance on ITV. Brought up on the 1950s predecessor to the series, starring Richard Greene in full swashbuckling mode, I eagerly switched on, only to be confronted by a wispy blond hero more akin to Sir Andrew Aguecheek than the brawny protagonist of English folklore. This wimp of a Robin, as I remember – though perhaps my memory exaggerates – had repeatedly to be rescued from disaster by a feisty Maid Marian. Since that time the role reversal phenomenon has taken a firm hold, with more and more men on the screen derided for their inability to look after themselves, let alone anyone else. ‘Oh no! It’s the Maid Marian syndrome again!’ my husband and I would wail, as yet another TV drama featured some hapless male plucked from the jaws of death by his spunky girlfriend.
All good for a laugh: but increasingly the crazed fantasies of fiction have invaded everyday life. It is not only in asserting that women can actually become men, or vice versa, that we defy the intransigence of biology, but in wishfully thinking that women are interchangeable with men in positions where physical strength is of the essence.
For instance, the police force, it seems, will not be content until equality between the sexes, numerically if not in muscle-power, has been achieved. In 2001 women accounted for around 17 per cent of police officers in England and Wales. This was judged to be unsatisfactory, and to boost the number of female recruits, adjustments were made to tests ‘unfair’ to the weaker sex. It worked. By 2024 the number of women in the force had more than doubled, to 35.4 per cent of the total. In addition, 40 per cent of chief constable positions (19 out of 49) were held by women. It is true that among those passing muster only after the tests were amended there would be some able to keep up with their male colleagues: but 43,089 of them? Only think of the justified outrage in reaction to trans contestants competing against women in, say, the boxing ring!
What do long-serving male officers think about the lowering of fitness standards? In an interview with Charlie Peters of GB News in December 2023, when a further adjustment was being considered on grounds of equality (this has since been partially adopted), some expressed dismay. When they go out on the street, they say, they want to be sure that their colleagues are able to back them up.
‘The fact the Police Federation is championing this drop in fitness,’ said one, ‘shows how far they’ve lost touch with rank-and-file officers.’
‘First the strength test was dropped in 2016,’ another pointed out, ‘and now the fitness test has been reduced to a level that an unfit tortoise could reach.’
In fact, according to former police officer Rory Geoghegan, founder of the Public Safety Foundation, ‘The fact that anyone is even considering lower fitness standards is utterly mad.’ In his opinion, standards needed to be raised, not lowered.
Perhaps the feminisation of the force would have posed no dangers in those far-off days when we were a high-trust, homogeneous nation; when, as a child of eight or nine, I could travel confidently alone on the London tube from Leyton to Bethnal Green to meet my mother from work. Today we live in a different world. Having done our best to stamp out any vestiges of ‘toxic masculinity’ in native English manhood, we have welcomed it enthusiastically from overseas. As we saw in the fracas at Manchester Airport last year, as demonstrated, too, by the no-go areas in our cities, where weapons are secreted in mosques with a view, presumably, to upholding sectarian interests, officers now frequently come up against ‘vigorous, bold men’ not averse to fighting: men devoid of emotional intelligence, who have experienced no sensitivity training, and who are not interested in embracing their vulnerabilities. When knife crime is rife and safety on the streets increasingly under threat, we do not need officers fit to take up cudgels only on behalf of those wounded by posts on social media; we need a fully manned-up police force serving the public rather than the government, keeping us safe from wrongdoers and ready to deal with whatever is thrown at them. Instead, last year we saw officers actually running away from the Harehills rioters (though others were able to show the stuff they were made of at a protest outside Downing Street a few days later, when they bravely arrested a selection of largely harmless demonstrators, not a few of them pensioners who had been caught criminally shouting or standing in the wrong place.)
With the presence on our streets of large numbers of unrepentantly masculine incomers who have not undergone a decades-long inculcation of the gentler female attributes, and whose attitude to women is not, shall we say, quite the same as ours, it would make sense to increase, rather than cut down on, the proportion of men in the police; to tighten up significantly on the physical requirements for front-line officers; and to assign those, both male and female, who have benefited from DEI hiring and the lowering of fitness standards in recent years to posts in line with their capacity.
There is obviously room for women in the police; there has been, ever since Voluntary Women’s Patrols were formed during World War I. However, at the present time what the force needs is not even more feminisation, but an adequate supply of well-trained, super-fit male officers able to come up with a ‘vigorous display of elegant toxic masculinity’ as the occasion demands.
