SOCRATES: I was walking back from the gymnasium when I saw Keir Mather, the new MP for Selby, on his way there. I had been told he was young and good-looking and went to a world-famous Oxford College, so I have been very keen to meet to him.
Hello, O Keir.
MATHER: And you too, Socrates. But what, therefore?
SOCRATES: Now that you are an MP, you must tell me what justice is. For that surely is a lawmaker’s main concern.
MATHER: Enough verbal games. Justice is defined by the laws. My job is to solve problems in the real world.
SOCRATES: Are Tory laws, then, just?
MATHER: Of course they are not!
SOCRATES: But you said…
MATHER: And I will change them and, I quote, by ‘my ability to process information and communicate it to people effectively, and to analyse complex problems and find frameworks through which to implement solutions’.
SOCRATES: Splendid – crystal clear! But come now, here is another problem to solve: what is a woman?
MATHER: Obviously, anyone who asserts that they are.
SOCRATES: So is asserting that you are someone exactly the same as being someone?
MATHER: How not, O Socrates?
SOCRATES: And if I said I was prime minister?
MATHER: Be very careful, Socrates. These days we do not think like that.
SOCRATES: Or at all. Come now, this justice of yours, is it of advantage to the community in the real world?
MATHER: Of course!
SOCRATES: But it is clearly not advantageous to the community, O Keir, for a man, who can fight, to become a woman, who cannot fight, nor have children. Would you not pass a law against it?
MATHER: But that is not a legal matter, Socrates, but one of human rights. Presumably you have never heard of them.
SOCRATES: True. We preferred not to live in a world of make-believe, where anyone could become anyone they liked merely by asserting it.
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