Labour leadership candidate Jeremy Corbyn wants to discuss gender apartheid – but only with women, of course:

Corbyn said: “Some women have raised with me that a solution to the rise in assault and harassment on public transport could be to introduce women only carriages.

“My intention would be to make public transport safer for everyone from the train platform, to the bus stop to on the mode of transport itself. However, I would consult with women and open it up to hear their views on whether women-only carriages would be welcome – and also if piloting this at times and modes of transport where harassment is reported most frequently would be of interest.”

As the idea provoked mixed reaction on social media, Corbyn’s campaign was quick to stress that it was a proposal that could be consulted on rather than a concrete policy.

Why is this idea out there? Because the number of sexual assaults of women on public transport has risen again. To RECORD LEVELS:

BTP recorded 1,399 sexual offences in 2014-15 in England, Scotland and Wales – up 282 on the previous year. Recorded violent crimes also increased – up 8% to 9,149 – but overall crime fell for the 11th year in a row. The force said the rise in sex crime figures was mainly due to a campaign to encourage reporting of these offences.

We have been here before:

What do these numbers tell us about the safety of women on UK trains? Basically, nothing at all.

To work out what is happening you need to factor in all sorts of, you know, facts. Put aside issues (tricky in themselves) of how far formal reports of such assaults represent the actual number of actual assaults. Look instead at changes in the numbers of men and women taking train journeys and the overall number of journeys taken over time. If far more men and women are taking train journeys, then the number of sex assaults may have risen but by less than one might have expected.

In other words, rail journeys in this sense could be getting safer for women EVEN THOUGH the number of assaults has risen. Without a careful analysis, we just don’t know one way or the other.

Put it another way. There must be billions or even trillions of small interactions between men and women on the UK’s train system every year. Yet only a thousand or so actual assaults are reported. In other words, the number of assaults is (arguably) statistically insignificant.

By any normal measure of ‘safety’ since trains were invented, rail journeys in the UK are overwhelmingly safe for women (and indeed for men) in every possible respect (other than getting somewhere on time).

By any standard of the safety of women at any time in human history anywhere on Earth, women on the UK’s trains are stunningly if not amazingly safe, in part because we have laws and procedures in place (including prosecution of those odious offenders who can not behave themselves) to achieve that outcome. The sheer smallness of the numbers of reported assaults shows exactly that.

This is not a problem. It’s a civilisational triumph.

Think about it in the context of cycling and road safety.

It’s possible that the number of cycling deaths is rising AND that cycling is getting much safer! The ‘safety’ of cycling can be measured in terms of the number of accidents involving cyclists as compared to the number of miles driven in cars and ridden on bikes. If more people take to their bikes, more cyclists may die EVEN IF more car-drivers are driving far more miles AND being far more careful when it comes to cyclists. There are just more cyclist/car interactions happening, a tiny proportion of which end up in a tragic accident for one reason or another.

This new example shows the essential collectivist phoniness of Jeremy Corbyn (and, to be honest, many other current Western politicians in all camps). These ishoos are not about facts, or about judiciously weighing sensible ideas. They are about state-imposed bullying to gruntle currently favoured interest groups. Insofar as any discernible ‘principle’ is at stake here, it is definitely not going to be applied consistently.

Thus some people could argue that the ‘Muslim community’ in the UK is the place to go these days if you are looking for violent extremists who want to kill and maim for ideological reasons. Back comes the quick retort that you need to put this ‘in perspective’: the ‘vast majority’ of UK Muslims are peaceful and patriotic!

And that’s right. You do need to keep a sense of perspective. The chances of being murdered by an Islamist fanatic are very small, albeit definitely not zero if you use public transport in London.

Yet if there are, say, ‘only’ a few hundred potential killers and fanatics within the Muslim community, ie a really tiny proportion of the Muslim community as a whole, what is meant to happen to protect the rest of us against them? After all, their numbers are ‘small’, but their ambitions and commitment to violence are prodigious. And the harm they cause if they succeed is horrendous.

To go by the logic of Corbyn-feminism, all Muslims should be segregated from non-Muslims on public transport, to protect the majority from that tiny minority:

“It is unacceptable that many non-Muslims adapt their daily lives in order to avoid being harassed on the street, public transport, and in other public places from the park to the supermarket … This could include taking longer routes to work, having self-imposed curfews or avoiding certain means of transport.”

When can we expect omni-judicious J Corbyn to consult non-Muslims to hear their views on how this might work at different times of day?

Ah, but this gender segregation case is completely different! Not all Muslims are potential killers, but all men are potential rapists! Because patriarchy!

What the public (and a democratic political party) should be looking for in a leader is someone who looks behind the silly babbling headlines and media junk data, and takes a firm clear view that looks at risks in a measured and consistent way. Jeremy Corbyn is not such a person.

It is trivially stupid to think about gender-segregated railway carriages without thinking about gender-segregated platforms and escalators and ticket-booths and station entrances and pavements and, well, everything. We have countries that attempt or have attempted things like that. South Africa and Saudi Arabia. They ‘work’ only with staggering levels of state-imposed violence.

How have we ended up with a supposedly credible Labour Party leadership candidate seeing the underlying odious and brutish apartheid principles of these societies as something worth earnest ‘consultation’?