"They'll never register that", I was told repeatedly by all and sundry, among them deeply disillusioned former Cabinet Ministers of both parties, not excluding sitting MPs.
Trots? No problem. The BNP? No problem. Single-issue parties? No problem. Purely local parties? No problem. Monster Raving Loony parties? No problem. Parties that want a global Caliphate, or want Hindutva, or want Khalistan, or believe the Provisional Army Council of the IRA to be the sovereign body throughout Ireland? No problem. But the pro-life, pro-family, pro-worker and anti-war party of economically social democratic, morally and socially conservative British and Commonwealth patriots? No chance.
In this great country of ours, you see, the name, constitution (including aims and objectives) and Leader of any political party has to be approved, annually and for a fee, by a central government body. Otherwise, you cannot use that name on a ballot paper or on election literature. Most people do not know this. Most people, indeed, would probably struggle to believe it. It never used to be the case. But it is now. And the agenda of that central government body may be discerned from the fact that it recently prejudiced any Police investigation by declaring publicly that George Osborne had no case to answer over his flagrant solicitation of a donation from Oleg Deripaska.
That body, the Electoral Commission, certainly did try very hard indeed to avoid registering us, endlessly demanding the same paperwork over and over again, and such like. They clearly expected us to go away. No doubt other people had done. So, indeed, I have been told. But we didn't. We were registered in the end, and seemed to have a acquired a certain sort of grudging respect as the best enemy, even to the extent that the Commission sent me a get well message after I had been in hospital last year, only really explicable in terms of regular reading of this blog.
But it hasn't lasted. The same tactic is being deployed: endlessly demanding the same paperwork over and over again. Plus sending things to the wrong address, having them delivered to the wrong house, and much else besides. At one point they tried to charge us five hundred pounds until we proved from recorded delivery that we were in the right. They might not have the time to investigate George Osborne. But they have all the time in the world to persecute us.
Is it worth it? The European Parliamentary bids could go ahead as a network of Independents. My People's Peer application is in, and is apparently being considered quite seriously. (Peers used to take their seats at 21 after having inherited in childhood, or in some cases at birth as posthumous sons. I am quite a bit older than 21, and do at least hold any political opinions, rather than merely having given the world The Big Breakfast, plus New Labour an awful lot of money. So that takes care of the main argument usually advanced on here against my application.) If that hasn't come through, then I will be contesting North West Durham in 2010 (though probably not any earlier, but there won't be a General Election this year), with considerable local goodwill and the promise of very considerable publicity. That, too, could just as easily be as an Independent.
So, is it worth it?
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What does "pro-family" mean? Whose definition of family do you use?
ReplyDeleteThe one that issues in such practical policies as:
ReplyDelete- Defence of marriage as between one man and one woman;
- Refusal to countenance the State lying that would be the issuing of new birth certificates to transsexuals;
- A legal presumption of equal parenting, restoration the tax allowance for fathers for so long as Child Benefit is still being paid to mothers, allowing paternity leave to be taken at any time in the first 18 years of the child’s life (asserting paternal authority, and requiring paternal responsibility, at key points in childhood and adolescence), restoring the requirement that the providers of fertility treatment take into account the child’s need for a father, and providing for poorer mothers of small children to be paid to stay at home with them, rather than paid to hand them over into the care of strangers;
- Entitlement of any couple intending to marry to make a legally binding declaration that their marriage shall be dissoluble only on the grounds and according to the procedures that obtained prior to the 1969 Divorce Reform Act (or its extensions to Scotland and Northern Ireland), and of religious organisations to make a legally binding declaration that any marriage solemnised according to their rites shall be such a marriage;
- Fixing of entitlement upon divorce at one per cent of the other party’s estate for each year of marriage, up to fifty per cent, with no entitlement for the petitioning party unless the other party’s fault be proved;
- Enablement of unmarried close relatives to contract civil partnerships, which already do not need to be consummated;
- Giving every household a base of real property from which to resist both over-mighty commercial interests and an over-mighty State;
- Requirement all secondary schools to teach the facts of foetal sentience, foetal personhood, Natural Family Planning, the medical side-effects of the Pill and other contraceptives, the ineffectiveness of condoms against the spread of HIV, and the effectiveness of abstinence outside marriage and fidelity within it;
- Total opposition to the further deregulation of drinking or gambling;
- Criminalisation (with exactly equal sentencing) both the buying and the selling of sex above the age of 18; and
- Reclassification of cannabis as a Class A drug, with a crackdown on the possession of drugs, including a mandatory sentence of three months for a second offence, six months for a third offence, one year for a fourth offence, and so on.
Among much else.
So you're fairly standard definition, I'd say.
So what's your definition of pro-worker then?
ReplyDeleteJames:
ReplyDelete- Exposure, halting and reversal the process whereby, far from having grown richer since 1979, Britons have in fact grown vastly poorer: only a generation ago, a single manual wage provided the wage-earner, his wife and their several children with a quality of life unimaginable even on two professional salaries today;
- Introduction of a unified system of personal tax allowances, benefits, pensions, student funding and minimum wage legislation, so that no one’s tax-free income falls below half national median earnings;
- Giving of every household a base of real property from which to resist both over-mighty commercial interests and an over-mighty State;
- Abolition of non-domicile tax status;
- A permanently higher rate of corporation tax on the banks and the privatised utilities, with the money spent on reimbursing employers’ National Insurance contributions for workers aged 25 or under and 55 or over, and with strict regulation to ensure that no cost is passed on to workers, consumers, communities or the environment;
- Mutualisation of the banks, and return of the utilities to public ownership;
- A ban on any company from paying any employee more than ten times what it pays any other employee, with the whole public sector (including MPs and Ministers) functioning as one for this purpose, its median wage pegged permanently at the median wage in the private sector;
- Requirement of every public limited company to have one non-executive director appointed by the Secretary of State for a fixed term equivalent to that of other directors, and responsible for protecting the interests of workers, small shareholders, consumers, communities and the environment;
- Renationalisation the railways, uniquely without compensation in view of the manner of their privatisation, as the basis for a national network of public transport free at the point of use, including the reversal of bus route and (where possible) rail line closures going back to the 1950s;
- Legislation for employment rights to begin on day one of employment and to apply regardless of the number of hours worked, as promised by the late John Smith;
- Allowing paternity leave to be taken at any time in the first 18 years of the child’s life.
- Building on the statutory right of every worker to join a trade union and to have that trade union recognised for collective bargaining purposes, by giving every trade unionist so recognised the statutory right to take industrial action in pursuit of a legitimate grievance, including strike action, and including solidarity action of a clearly secondary character (such as a work to rule in support of a strike) within a single industry or corporation;
- Abolition of all remaining vestiges of Compulsory Competitive Tendering, of the capping of councils, and of the power of central government to rule local services ultra vires;
- Defence of council housing (includings ecurity of tenure)wherever tenants or local communities wish to retain it;
- Abolition of prescription charges, and restoration free eye and dental treatment;
- Invitation to the trade unions to identify ten “dream” policies and ten “nightmare” policies, with ten per cent funding to any candidate (regardless of party, if any) for subscription to each of the former, minus ten per cent for failure to rule out each of the latter; and
- Union and other funding of the development and delivery of a qualification for “non-graduates” with life and work experience who aspire to become MPs.
Among much else.
So you're fairly standard definition, I'd say.
How can you be an anti-war patriot?
ReplyDeleteBecause the point of the Armed Forces is to prevent wars.
ReplyDeleteBy deterring them.
And, of course, to fight them if anyone nevertheless does start them against us.
The point of Armed Forces is *not* to be sent, by those who would never dream of sending themselves or their families, to war against people who pose no threat whatever to us, and might even be our more natural allies than the alternatives in their own countries.
Such less natural allies (to say the very least) include those who have taken over Iraq since the removal of Saddam Hussein. And they include either the Communist Party of the Russian Federation or the National Bolsheviks, the only alternatives to Putin and Medvedev.
And wars are not conservative.
They cost taxpayers vast sums of money. You might argue that the taxpayers should simply have been able to keep that money. Or you might argue that it should have been spent on fighting want, ignorance, ill health, idleness and squalor. But either way, you cannot argue for spending it on wars instead, if at all avoidable.
They create new enemies (and entrench or embitter old ones), and thus create future threats.
And they are morally and socially disruptive. Everything to do with the Swinging Sixties started during the War. Just ask anyone of that generation. My late father always made that point in the Eighties, when Margaret Thatcher was on about the Sixties: she was right (not that her own policies did anything to help matters, to say the very least), but it really all went back to the War.
Now these things are being said openly, in television documentaries and in newspaper interviews with aged figures: the epidemic of venereal disease during the War, how London's and other cities' parks were turned on VE Night into giant outdoor orgies worthy of (indeed, surpassing) anything to come in the summer of 1968, and so much else besides. We all laugh at the old ladies from whose bedrooms the Normandy Landings were allegedly launched, and such like. But it was no laughing matter.
Sometimes a war is inescapable, such as when our territory is invaded. But we are neither fighting nor facing any such war today.
So you are all for defence?
ReplyDeleteOh, for defence, yes. Peace has to be defended.
ReplyDeleteThe problem is with world government and coercive utopianism, with the present and putative wars in those causes, and with tax-guzzling and policy-dictating military-industrial complexes at home and abroad.
But preserve and restore the historic regimental system as the basis of the British Army’s efficiency.
Rebuild the Royal Navy.
Save the Royal Air Force from neoconservative schemes for its abolition.
Give former Gurkha soldiers in the British Army the absolute right to settle and be naturalised in the United Kingdom.
And charge only home fees to the student children of serving or former Gurkhas and Commonwealth personnel in the British Armed Forces.
Peace has to be defended.
You are against nuclear weapons.
ReplyDeleteThe Army top brass quietly agree with us on that one, or we with them, depending on how you want to look at it.
ReplyDeleteTheir RAF counterparts have had growing doubts ever since they stopped having any nuclear weapons of their own.
And even the Navy would come round once they were shown where else the money could and would be spent. Mostly not on military matters, of course. But in part, and including on rebuilding the Navy.
Re "pro-family":
ReplyDeleteDavid, your definition sounds like something GW Bush's administration thought up!
If I were in a civil partnership with my partner (my beloved, not a relative), would we be able to adopt under your party's policies?
And if so, would our family be viewed as a family, or do you advocate a return to Margaret Thatcher's stance that they are "pretend"?
Just checking you're not espousing right-wing discriminatory policies normally favoured by Republicans and Tories and not those on the left of the spectrum.
For obvious reasons I can't give you my name or tell you exactly my civic position, but I have seen minutes of the Commission's meetings. It is true that there has been official pressure not to allow registration of the BPA. When I say official, I mean from sources close to Downing Street. I don't know what the reasoning is, and it may only be that Labour are scared of losing seats in the North-East, but your impression is accurate. This may sound strange, but I know it for a fact. Do take care.
ReplyDeleteThe BPA 2008-2009 RIP...sad moment
ReplyDeleteActually, I also have real reservations about your policy on condoms - spreading the myth that they don't prevent HIV infection actually endangers real people's lives. There are hundreds of thousands of HIV/AIDS victims in Africa, thanks to that lie.
ReplyDeleteAnd sure, I wouldn't want my (adopted) child entering a sexual relationship until they're mature enough to do so and it's stable, loving and faithful. But promoting abstinence as the only method to prevent unwanted pregnancies just doesn't work - look at the US Bible Belt where there has been a rise in teenage pregnancies, predominantly in lower income families.
Condoms are 99.5% effective against disease and unwanted pregnancy and to pretend otherwise is dangerous.
Robin, you and many others might consider applying some journalistic or scientific objectivity to the question of where in Africa the condom use relentlessly promoted by Western NGOs and compliant governments has ever arrested, never mind reversed, the rate of HIV infection. There is nowhere.
ReplyDeleteHowever, such a reversal is under way in Uganda, where the government's message is the same as the Catholic Church's: "Change Your Behaviour". Huge numbers of condoms have been distributed in Botswana, and the result has been for President Festus Mogae to declare, "Abstain or die". Who, exactly, is incapable of fidelity within a monogamous marriage and abstinence outside such a marriage? Women? Black people? Poor people? Developing-world people? Or just poor black women in the developing world?
It is also worth pointing out that Africa is eighty-seven per cent non-Catholic anyway.
You could adopt. You always could. Catholic adoption agencies would not be required to place children with you, however. That way, those agencies would stay in existence. It was the amount of adoption done through the Catholic agencies, the pioneers f adoption, that so annoyed the abortion-obsessed State in this country. It is determined to close them down, and is doing only too good a job of it.
Our definition of family life is the one to which the founders of the Labour Movement would have, and did, adhere.
Anonymous 18:10, it has been only too clear for many months where they stand. So, Anonymous 18:44, they should be so lucky? I am beginning to think so. My inbox is full today, even though many of our lot wouldn't ordinarily bother on a Sunday. I am bracing myself for tomorrow's deluge.
Yes, it all makes sense now. The comment at 1810 is absolutely right. I've seen the same minutes and I work at the Cabinet Office. There's a total determination to prevent the British People's Alliance getting known and the order comes from the top. You've noted, David, the support given by Gordon Brown to atheistic and pro-death causes. They're worried that the pro-life vote will catch on to what's happening and sweep Labour out of power. Keep going, because at this rate you'll at least be the third party in the Commons next time.
ReplyDeleteWell, let's just say that I'd be delighted in my surprise if that came to pass.
ReplyDeleteThe powers that be certainly do know that the disaffection is out there, and that it will become more vociferous in the next Parliament when even the handful of MPs who can still tap into it have either been pensioned off or are about to be.
The behaviour of the Electoral Commission makes it abundantly clear that they are determined to kill off anything that might then be waiting in the wings (however far out in the wings) with the potential to grow into a mass movement located where many or most people are in all three of economic, social/cultural, and foreign policy terms. I doubt that we are the only ones being dealt with.
I say again, candidacies can go ahead anyway, and the peerage application is in. The House of Lords Appontments Commission doesn't seem to have been as subordinated as the Electoral Commission has been, even though they were created by the same people. Not yet, anyway.
But what we, what I, really want is of course to give back to our people a voice at the ballot box. And that will require a party eventually. Won't it?
No, you misunderstand. This isn't the Electoral Commission, it's much higher up the food chain. I know this because I see things that pass through the Cabinet Office. If your party has a postal address then I can send them to you (I won't do it by email because they'd be traceable). But I can tell you that the battleground the establishment fears is the North-East. Hexham will stay Tory, South Shields and Sedgefield will stay Labour, but everything else, including Berwick is your territory. That's the assumption behind the BPA third-place projection.
ReplyDeleteBut the BPA was registered. Wasn't it? So you've already got over the hurdles you seem so worried about.
ReplyDeleteWould that it ended there, Ebbw. Would that it ended there...
ReplyDeleteWe have already lost an officer because he just couldn't be bothered any longer. The endless, and really rather menacing, correspondence was taking over his life. This is what it must feel like to have no television.
Julian, our address is on the Electoral Commission website, of course (although just put me, not the BPA, on the envelope).
I'd be very surprised if anything you said came true, although of course our roots are in the North East, and we have what may be called its sensibility, shared with many other parts of the country (including any parts of London) but wholly alien to the centre.
We could win 12 seats Strasbourg seats if we were able to organise without constantly having to fight this rearguard action against the Commission, rather like always having to clear our throats and never being able to say anything.
And I could win NW Durham (I only have to be the First Past The Post on an extremely low turnout, after all) on the same basis, not least because both the Labour and the Independent machines in the predominant part of it have known me for ever, agree with me far more than they disagree with me, and will by then be incandescent at the imposition of some Millbank clone, an incandescence which will be widely shared by the voters.
They owe Labour nothing after the abolition of Derwentside District Council, and they tell me so entirely openly. I actually wonder who will sign the Labour candidate's nomination papers next time.
Does the resignation of this officer mean that you are no longer able to remain legally registered? Or are there enough others to keep you going?
ReplyDeleteNio such luck (though for whom, and why?), we're still going all right.
ReplyDeleteYou do realise, don't you, that Julian is taking the mickey out of you. I should know - I work at Labour Party HQ.
ReplyDeleteOh, I know. But he speaks in jest more truth than he realises.
ReplyDeleteWhen you stood for the District Council as an Independent didn't one of the Labour candidates try and sign your nomination papers?
ReplyDeleteLabour Party HQ, Liz? Says it all. Absolutely no idea about the real world.
Oh, yes, and not just mine. I had to explain to him very slowly that he'd be expelled if he did.
ReplyDeleteWhen DDC ceases to be, I know for a fact that numerous of my old mates with community contacts to die for, and who have never much liked Hilary never mind whoever is parachuted in to replace her, are just going to let their Labour Party membership drop.
You are right about the party centre (there's really only one for all of them - it's just on three sites in order to deceive people, like the use of three different names), full of teenagers who are some cases still on the books of one of two universities, and who don't know anyone who doesn't think exactly as they do, so assume that no such people exist. Oxford or Cambridge is the furthest north that any of them has ever been. They don't have a clue.
If they don't sign your nomination papers and campaign for you they'll have the priests to answer to. This was how Labour in Australia split for a generation.
ReplyDeleteIf that's how you want to put it. And it was longer than one generation, really.
ReplyDeleteActually, I am in quite close touch with several of the old Bob Santamaria crowd. Wonderful thing, this electricity.
It could only begin in the Consett-based seat.
ReplyDeleteIn England, that's probably now true.
ReplyDeleteAnd it would have to begin in England. There are now too many distractions elsewhere. Not necessarily for much longer. But for now.
So, the Consett-based seat it is, then.
Supported by a newsppaer distributed free - FREE - at the back of every Catholic church in the region for Europe or the constituency for Westminster. Due out the weekend before the election and then not for a month afterwards. You can't buy publicity like that.
ReplyDeleteAnd we don't have to.
ReplyDeleteIn Labour HQ they want Cameron to win.
ReplyDeleteWell, of course they do. They are ever-loyal to the Lost Leader, and therefore support his Heir.
ReplyDeleteIt's like Jacobitism in fact.
ReplyDeleteIs it true that an Independent last time whose election address was plaigarised from your letters to the local free paper got more votes than the cut in Armstrong's majority and kept his deposit?
Both of the things that you say are true, except that there was no plaigarism involved. I put ideas out into the public domain, and a politician picked up on them. With modest, but discernable, success.
ReplyDeleteIf he'd been pro-life he'd have cut her majority in half.
ReplyDeleteAnd that would have been against her, not some imposed teaboy/girl from outside the area. If they have any sense David they'll be fast tracking that peerage right now.
ReplyDeleteDon't take the peerage. What they really fear is that you'll win a seat in the Commons and become a focus for a new movement.
ReplyDeleteI have not been offered one. And I will certainly be contesting this seat in 2010 (though not before) if I don't have one by then. Which, not least because of the reassuring slowness of the process, seems extremely likely.
ReplyDeleteIn David's mind the political norm is what he was very active in for so many years, a permanent ruling alliance of the Old Labour right (largely church-based, largely Catholic) and Peter Hitchens type Independents, with the only opposition coming from the Labour left.
ReplyDeleteUnfotunately all three of those would support him for Parliament because he always remained on very good personal terms with the Labour left and first came to prominence in the strange early Blair years when he could pass himself off as one of their own.
Thank God for imposed candidates and all women shotlists. Without all women shortlists especially David would have stayed in Labour and been nominated when Hilary retired.
Having lived here all my life I am extremely concerned that Labour is choosing their candidate based on who is Catholic enough to beat a man with many connections to the American Catholic Right and the Vatican itself.
ReplyDeleteSee http://davidaslindsay.blogspot.com/2009/01/catholic-thing.html
ReplyDelete