THE Tory “minister for common sense” attacked the SNP’s “gender self-identifying bill” as she launched an impassioned defence of “common sense”.

Minister without portfolio Esther McVey – who has been dubbed the “minister for common sense” – has announced she will axe dedicated equality, diversity and inclusion jobs in the civil service.

Speaking at an event in London on Monday, the minister hailed common sense as “our sixth sense”, which she said was “as important a sense of sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell”.

Referring to the UK Government’s block on the Gender Recognition Reform Bill, she said: “We had to intervene too when the SNP tried to bring into force their gender self-identifying bill while allowing biological male rapists into female prisons.”

Citing the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher Thomas Reid, who taught at Aberdeen and Glasgow, she said: “Common sense allows us to perceive and understand the world in a meaningful way.”

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McVey added: “From the tsunami of correspondence I have received, the public are relieved common sense is back on the political agenda so that policies can be rooted back in the practical, everyday concerns of ordinary people because it is who politicians are elected to represent.

“Regular folk, the backbone of this country who day in, day out work hard to keep the show on the road and who are proud of who we are as a country and of our history.”

She took aim at universities which she argued were seeking to subvert common sense.

McVey said: “The longstanding appeal of common sense is that it involves logic, reasoning, data, empiricism and objectivity.

“However for some time now, left-wing academics have been trying to usurp and dismantle our developed ability to perceive and judge things in a practical way from past experiences and accumulated knowledge by promoting new theories where they purport knowledge is based on power structures and social constructs, not evidence and reason.

“Where my truth replaces the truth, where subjective has replaced objective and where emotion has overtaken logic and where one’s personal journey matters more than fact and data. And it is these theories, some on race, some on gender, that have been chipping away at our values, our structures our history and our culture.”

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She said that “left-wing theories have infiltrated our universities and schools and our public services” including the NHS.

And she heaped praise on JK Rowling, former Sussex University philosopher Kathleen Stock, radical feminist writer Julie Bindel and Dr Hillary Cass for being “prepared to stand up and fight to defend what a woman is and state the obvious; biological and physical differences between men and women exist”.

She went on: “It is beyond absurd and it is sad, yet necessary, that we had to commission Dr Hillary Cass to do a report into gender in order to protect children from irreversible medical and surgical changes as children were fast-tracked onto puberty blockers and sex-changing surgery.”

The SNP declined to comment.