One In The Saddleworth?

Beyond the fact that she came third this year at Colne Valley, up to then a Labour seat, what do we know about Debbie Abrahams, the Labour candidate at Oldham East & Saddleworth?

Will she give a voice to those whose priorities include the Welfare State, workers’ rights, trade unionism, the co-operative movement, consumer protection, strong communities, conservation rather than environmentalism, fair taxation, full employment, public ownership, proper local government, a powerful Parliament, and a base of real property for every household to resist both over-mighty commercial interests and an over-mighty State, while having a no less absolute commitment to any or all of the monarchy, the organic Constitution, national sovereignty, civil liberties, the Union, the Commonwealth, the countryside, grammar schools, traditional moral and social values, controlled importation and immigration, and a realistic foreign policy?

Will she give a voice to those who are aware of, who understand, who value and who draw on the Radical Liberal, Tory populist, trade union, co-operative, Christian Socialist, Social Catholic and Distributist, and other roots of the Labour Movement, rejecting cultural Marxism no less comprehensively than they reject economic Marxism, and vice versa?

Will she give a voice to those who, with Herbert Morrison, have never seen any conflict “between Labour and what are known as the middle classes”, and who, with Aneurin Bevan, denounce class war, calling instead for “a platform broad enough for all to stand upon” and for the making of “war upon a system, not upon a class”?

Will she give a national platform and profile to the alliance of the traditional Right and the traditional Left against the neoconservative war agenda and its assaults on liberty at home, including against any new Cold War with either or both of Russia and China?

Is she part of the socially and culturally conservative, strongly patriotic tendencies within the British Left’s traditional electoral base?

Does she recognise that we cannot deliver the welfare provisions and the other public services that our people have rightly come to expect unless we know how many people there are in this country, unless we control immigration properly, and unless we insist that everyone use spoken and written English to the necessary level?

Will she refuse to allow climate change to be used as an excuse to destroy or prevent secure employment, to drive down wages or working conditions, to arrest economic development around the world, to forbid the working classes and non-white people from having children, to inflate the fuel prices that always hit the poor hardest, or to restrict either travel opportunities or a full diet to the rich?

And could she therefore co-operate as closely as possible with the forces of provincial, rural, protectionist, church-based, conservative, mind-our-own-business Toryism, forces set free by electoral reform from tendencies variously metropolitan, urban, capitalist, secular, libertarian and make-the-world-anew?

Is Debbie Abrahams that candidate? My friend would have been. I wonder if he was shortlisted? If not, then only because he was a he. Oh, and because he never come third in what had until then been a Labour seat. Plus, he is not married to the former captain of Lancashire County Cricket. Roll on electoral reform, after which none of us need any longer think about the organisation still purporting to be the Labour Party.

In the meantime, have we an alternative candidate? And have we anyone on hand, either in Essex or the East End for Barking should the BNP succeed in ousting Margaret Hodge on the Woolas principle, or in Hampshire or one of the adjacent counties should the New Cold Warriors succeed in forcing Mike Hancock out of Portsmouth South?