At last I have found a summer festival I can attend in good faith without the possibility of Jeremy Corbyn turning up. I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that there seemed to be no festive gatherings planned which Corbyn wouldn’t attend, with his retinue of Trot imbeciles. In response, the philosopher Roger Scruton very kindly invited me to join him at a shindig hosted by the psychopathic tweed-jacketed fox-stranglers of the Countryside Alliance.

It was a generous offer and I hope Roger will take it in good part if I say I would rather perform a colonoscopy on Diane Abbott than mix with that lot. Instead, I have found a Corbyn-free venue of bacchanalia which both Roger and I can attend and enjoy: Woman Fest, which takes place near Frome in mid-August. Open only to women and people who identify as women, which Rog and I would have to do for the day. Well worth it. The organisers exhort revellers to: ‘Share YOUR knowledge, teach a class, bring your art, sing your music, SHINE! Even if it’s terrifying, even if it’s uncomfortable, we invite you to be the best you, the empowered you, the vulnerable and free and wild and mysterious and brilliant and beautiful and creative and wise and bold and infinite and sexy and powerful and inspiring… you.’

That sounds to me exactly the kind of thing Roger would love, and I imagine he would also appreciate nosing around the ‘Sacred Womb Tent’. Better still will be the area set aside for vaginal steaming. Obviously, we would not be beneficiaries of this exciting treatment. But I am hopeful that both of us might be allowed to operate the steaming apparatus for a while, which I think would prove instructive and uplifting and a much more fitting pastime for a brilliant philosopher than killing animals for fun, or simpering around the thugs who do.

What they really need at Woman Fest is a tent to cure people of homosexuality. There will be lots of women there swept up in the political modishness of same-sex relationships, especially if they have spent too long in the Sacred Womb Tent or having their lady gardens steamed by a beaming and fragrant earth mother.

An alternative opinion might not go amiss, then. Just an alternative opinion, a different approach. Not one they have to take. Just something that might help, or might not. But fat chance of that.

Melanie Phillips wrote an excellent article this week on the totalitarianism of those who perpetually believe they are being discriminated against, the intransigence and intolerance towards those who do not share their point of view. The banning of white people from ‘intersectional’ conferences, ethnically themed dorms on American campuses where white people are discriminated against. She might have added feminists being banned from speaking when they don’t toe the line on transgenderism, and a thousand other iniquities perpetrated in the name of ‘equality’.

But more pertinently, Mel didn’t point out that this fascistic guff is swallowed whole by our government, a nominally Conservative government. It is now thinking of making illegal the offering of therapy which might ‘convert’ someone who thinks they are gay into someone who is not gay. This is all at the behest of campaigning bodies such as Stonewall, and their insistence that an alternative opinion should be made illegal betrays the fragility of their philosophy, a terror that many of the right-on shibboleths they spout may be based on a falsehood.

That the government should bow down towards such authoritarianism is the real crime, though. Gay conversion therapy, as its opponents call it, has made the lives of thousands of people happier: that is indisputable. I spoke to one chap who had considered himself gay for much of his twenties and thirties, was uncomfortable about it, and is now straight and happy (get over it!).

Ian, a healthcare professional, was abused by an older male as a ten-year-old child. He later felt confused over his feelings towards other men, estranged from the commonly held view in the working-class area in which he grew up that men who displayed their emotions and felt affectionate towards other men weren’t quite right, were probably queer.

A clever bloke, he did a bit of research. Eventually he contacted a Christian counsellor who, through a series of 45-minute telephone conversations, enabled him to understand that his feelings towards other men were neither abnormal nor an indication that he was homosexual. Ian isn’t a Christian. ‘I was a little bit suspicious at first,’ he said, of his counsellor, ‘but it didn’t put me off.’ Ian was not browbeaten with Christian commandments, he was not bullied. He just talked to a counsellor and as a consequence his life has immeasurably improved.

Nobody is suggesting that all gay people might benefit from conversion therapy. Nobody is questioning the right of gay people to live happily, free from discrimination, and to enjoy their lives the same as the rest of us. And yet because some gay people — the lobbyists, largely paid for by you and me — are so shriekingly intolerant of any views which differ from their own that they wish to make these against the law. You may remember the debate a few years back about gay marriage — and Stonewall saying that if people don’t agree with gay marriage then they should probably avoid getting married to a gay man. They thought that was the clincher in the argument. Well, OK, Stonewall — if you don’t agree with gay conversion therapy, then don’t sign up for gay conversion therapy. Hoisted with their own petard.

The government is planning lots more absurd stuff on associated matters, including the appointment of an LGBT health tsar and allowing people who think they’re transgendered to alter their birth certificates and, who knows, maybe their chromosomes as well. A Conservative government, doing this because it thinks it’s nice.