I was a proud expellee from the organisation then calling itself New Labour. I have no intention of rejoining, since I shall be voting to re-elect both of my sitting unitary county councillors, one Labour and one Independent, and since I have never voted Labour in a European Election and do not intend to start, due to the extreme federalist position, contrary to his own party’s policy, of the list-topping Labour candidate here in the North East.
But Ed Miliband’s Labour Party, as such, has pointedly declined to endorse the legal redefinition of marriage to include same-sex couples, a change which was specifically ruled out in 2000 by the then Home Secretary, Jack Straw. Expect a Labour free vote. That might deliver enough votes to defeat this proposal, if enough Coalition MPs broke a three-line whip and opposed a Government Bill which was not in either of their manifestos.
Ed Miliband’s Labour Party is also totally opposed to the cutting of incomes outside London and its environs, to the deregulation of Sunday trading, to the devastation of rural communities by letting foreign companies or even foreign states buy up our postal service or our roads, and to Royal Mail privatisation’s severing of the monarchy’s direct link to every address in this Kingdom.
And Ed Miliband’s Labour Party is the only Opposition party capable of winning the 2015 General Election. At that Election, it and he will deserve every support from everyone non-metropolitan, or who believes in traditional marriage, or who wants to keep Sunday special, or who supports family and local community businesses, or who cherishes rural communities and the countryside, or who defends national sovereignty over our economy and our infrastructure, or who values the Queen’s head on our stamps and her crown and initials on our post boxes.
In 1974, Enoch Powell told his supporters to vote Labour because of Europe. This is a 1974 moment.
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I remember when you were seriously talked about as a candidate for the European Parliament. So Fleming put the kibosh on you. Same as he did when the great Alex Watson wanted to give you a portfolio, you were stopped from being a district candidate at all and the ludicrously unelectable Fleming was put up instead. Labour deliberately lost a seat rather than let you have it. And when Fleming stopped the CLP from nominating you for the NEC.
ReplyDeleteHe was determined to ensure that you had as much chance of a Strasbourg seat, a district portfolio or a place on the NEC as he was ever going to have. He should be made to write a review of Confessions of an Old Labour High Tory just to give us all a laugh. Readers of it should remember whose fault it is that the author is not an MP, not an MEP, not an NEC member, not even a councillor above parish level, not even a school governor any more, not even a party member any more.
On the basis of the position set out in that book, why don't you put up for MEP anyway next time, as an Independent? You have proved in the past that you get three times as many votes without Labour as with them. And something like 10 times as many votes as Fleming, who is ballot box poison. Fiona Hall's seat has to go to someone when the Lib Dems are wiped out. Why not you?
Is that an offer of funding? For therein (far more than in health, although there is that, too) lies the problem.
ReplyDelete"Ed Miliband’s Labour Party, as such, has pointedly declined to endorse the legal redefinition of marriage to include same-sex couples, a change which was specifically ruled out in 2000 by the then Home Secretary, Jack Straw."
ReplyDeleteHere is Yvette Cooper, Labour's Shadow Home Secretary, backing same sex marriage and calling on the government to go further by allowing religious institutions which wish to conduct same sex marriages to do so.
And?
ReplyDeleteThe key word there is "Shadow". And Cooper's card has been marked, anyway. She won't be a Minister under Ed Miliband. She has campaigned too publicly for his job. Don't ask me how I know that. But I do. It's amazing how reads this site.
As I said, expect a Labour free vote. Whereas, Government Bill as this will be, the Coalition parties will make it subject to a three-line whip.
They have certainly read this post. The funniest thing will be the reaction of the likes of Rentoul, Hodges and Kamm when Labour campaigns on a programme of reversing NHS privatisation, re-regulating Sunday trading, renationalising the Post Office and the roads, restoring the country planning regulations that Osborne wants to tear up, and letting the gay marriage bill die if it is not already on the statute book by 2015, which at this rate it very well won't be. Never mind any anti-EU stuff, already in the pipeline and very much influenced by your proposals in print and online. God, I wish you were an MP, I wish you were Deputy Leader instead of Harridan. On the first point at least, I'm not the only one. You just belong inside the parliamentary process more than anyone else I have ever come across, it is somehow just wrong without you in it but with the knowledge that you exist, the definitive British political thinker of his post-liberal generation. I am not the only person who thinks that.
ReplyDeleteOh, I know who reads this site, and my books, and so on. They email me often enough to tell me so. "It's not so much how many, as whom."
ReplyDeleteOn the issues in this post, it has nothing to do with me that they have taken the line that they have. They would have done so anyway now that Blair and his weird little sect were out of the way. But the deafening silence over the marriage issue is still more than noteworthy.
On the old liberal order's being weird, or WEIRD, see David Goodhart's book review in the latest edition of Prospect. He is another of us beavering away, along with Neil Clark, Maurice Glasman, and so on. The tyranny of the WEIRDoes has come to an end within the Labour Party, and will come to an end in the nation at large in 2015.
As I said, Sunday trading, on the Post Office, on the roads, on rural planning, even on the redefinition of marriage as not a matter of party policy (or, therefore, of Government time in Parliament), Ed Miliband would in any case have taken the view - postliberal, if you will - that he has.
We shall have real cause to congratulate ourselves if by 2015 we have managed to secure something like my recurring list of civil liberty restorations and toughened up criminal justice policies as the conditions for each other, or something like my recurring five-point plan for the repatriation of powers from the EU, or something like my scheme for a sort of voluntarily less easily dissoluble marriage, or something like my proposals for more balanced spending among the different parts of the United Kingdom and more legislative power for their respective MPs, or Neil's signature policy of renationalising the railways and utilities, or the recognition that significant numbers of voters are now waiting to be tapped in the previously almost Labour-free rural Radical heartlands of the West Country, the North and South of Scotland, and Liberal rather than Nationalist Mid Wales.
On all of those points, our people face much stiffer opposition from the Blairite relics and retreads. But our people are working on them all the same. They email me often enough to tell me so. And the daily rage of the WEIRDoes trying to post comments on here makes it splendidly apparent how well our people are getting on against them.
How are the reviews for the book going? Positive, are they?
ReplyDeleteThere is a whole book of them being put together, I am told. Rather impressive line-up, as well.
ReplyDelete"I remember when you were seriously talked about as a candidate for the European Parliament. So Fleming put the kibosh on you. Same as he did when the great Alex Watson wanted to give you a portfolio, you were stopped from being a district candidate at all and the ludicrously unelectable Fleming was put up instead. Labour deliberately lost a seat rather than let you have it. And when Fleming stopped the CLP from nominating you for the NEC."
ReplyDeleteThis sounds truly awful. The only way it could have been worse was if he had spread rumours that you are a closet homosexual in the hope that local religious types would never vote for you.
If he has, then it hasn't worked. And it certainly wouldn't now that a number of them have read my latest book.
ReplyDeleteHe's just about inept enough to try that one. You would would never have thought that he had grown up here, he never understood the electorate here one little bit.
Now, on topic, please.