Unfarepak

The legal fees in the Farepak case have now exceeded any compensation to which the victims might ever be entitled.

I don't know which is worse, that fact, or the fact that the only party to have taken up this case has been Arthur Scargill's Socialist Labour Party, not in fact a vehicle for the Old Labour Left, but overwhelmingly a refuge for the pro-Soviet wing of the former Communist Party of Great Britain, and duly associated with the dotty historical theories of the Stalin Society.

Imagine if our country were divided into one hundred constituencies, each with as near as possible to an equal number of voters. Imagine if each of us voted for one candidate, with the six highest scorers declared elected at the end.

Permanent sizeable blocs might include a Blair or Cameron-style party of economically neoliberal, socially liberal, internationally neoconservative types, although I cannot help doubting whether very many people at all would vote for such a thing if it presented itself honestly as such.

However, permanent sizeable blocs would certainly include a party of High Tory paleocons (in the British and Old Commonwealth sense, so with a high view of the economic and social role of the State), an Old Liberal party (quite possibly the old Liberal Party, which still exists), an Old Labour Left party such as people wrongly supposed that the SLP might be or might become, and party of the patriotic and socially conservative base of the mainstream British Left.

Since an overall majority would always be impossible without at least four parties, we might reasonably hope and expect that all of these would always be in government at any given time. At least three of them definitely would be.

And then, like the victimisation of Remploy and so many other things, the victimisation of Farepak could simply never have happened.