And you are...?

This blog is ridiculed on http://innerwestcentral.blogspot.com, ostensibly by one of its two authors, known to me only as "Kittens James". The other such author, Simon Mollon, maintains that I have never met "Kittens James", whereas I know Simon (a twelfth year student who is now, in his fourth decade, celebrating his Silver Jubilee as a schoolboy) very well indeed, and consider that the post about me must therefore have been written by him.

It makes reference to the University of Durham, as if I should care: at the same time as people educated far beyond their intelligence (at necessarily vast expense, after the manner of Blair or Cameron) were subjecting me to daily ridicule, humiliation and exclusion in that God-forsaken hell-hole, the rather nobler, and rather brighter, inhabitants of the real world were electing me to a Council and appointing me to the Governing Bodies of two schools. Simon, of course, has never lived in the real world, and is not someone whom one could easily imagine in such capacities.

Furthermore, Simon has never actually set foot in the North-West Durham parliamentary constituency on which he now purports to be such an expert, still less has he lived here for 25 years or been politically active here for half his lifetime. He should be aware that the idea of my seeking the Labour nominaton here, or standing as an Independent if I did not secure it, was first suggested to me by a very senior local Labour figure at the count for the last General Election. Has anyone ever made a comparable sugestion to Simon? For that matter, has he ever attended the count for any proper, non-student election? He should also be aware that, at that Election, an Independent candidate (a leading Councillor) secured more votes than the reduction in the Labour majority on an Election Address largely based, often word-for-word, on my letters published the previous autumn in the local free newspaper. Has Simon ever had that sort of influence?

The removed Wikipedia material about how Hilary Armstrong is regarded in the Derwenstide part of her constituency is a matter of fact and of common knowledge. The former, at least, can also be said of my links to the Labour Leadership on Derwentside District Council and to the powerful Catholic Church in these parts. Quite what party or wider political links Simon has ever had, I cannot imagine.

There is also ridicule of the Working Families of America Political Action Committee, which Simon should address to the AFL-CIO, to Change To Win, to the Alliance for Marriage, and to The American Cause, all of which are in regular receipt of the relevant material. As are a number of other people... Not least among those other people are activists seeking to organise the 35% of American registered voters now identifying as Independents, a figure obviously comparable to the consistent 34%-37% of Britons who now have to be factored out of opinion polls because they say, not that they "Don't know", but that they are firmly resolved not to vote for any of the existing parties.

Like the America's Founding Peoples Political Action Committee (which I note that Simon is too spineless to mock, much as he undoubtedly wants to), the WFA-PAC will soon be handed over to entirely American leadership (I am merely doing the donkey work, so to speak), and has, in this electronic age, the potential to exercise considerable influence over the 2008 Elections (especially those to the House of Representatives). After all, they are both very much of a piece with the reclaiming of the Civil Rights Movement by the black churches (and vice versa), with the increasing recognition by the Democratic Party that it will never again go where it once went unless it becomes again what it once was, and so forth. Meanwhile, Simon Mollon's impact on those elections will be ... well, what, exactly?