Following the blather over "the Muslim vote" at Bradford West, let us examine the commentators in the national daily and Sunday newspapers.
Muslims - none.
Reform Jews - two, both members of the same synagogue, and it is not in Bury.
Orthodox Jews, by far the most numerous community of observant Jews in Britain - none.
Evangelical Protestants, including members of the black churches - none.
Traditional Anglicans, even broadly defined - one or two.
Eastern Orthodox, now about as numerous in this country as practising Methodists - none, a factor not without significance in the preposterous coverage of Russia and of the Middle East, perhaps especially of Syria.
Orthodox Catholics - none, with the position illegitimately occupied by a neoliberal and neoconservative heretic from the Church's Teaching on justice and peace, a man whose very presence constitutes the sort of aggressive promotion of 1970s separatist, promiscuous, high camp homosexuality embodied by Graham Norton, or Julian Clary, or the late Larry Grayson, and whose employment of Kit Cunningham amounted to a public approval of the activities about which, as stated almost in so many words in a blog post after Cunningham's death, Fleet Street had known all along.
Whingeing liberal Catholics and, especially, embittered ex-Catholics, often from working-class backgrounds and owing everything to the Catholic school system that they so revile - two a penny.
Piners for the doctrinally and morally content-free high culture of public school and Oxbridge college chapels - ten a penny.
Secular Jews whose religion and whose political ideology are both a sort of Universal Zionism in which everything has to be run exclusively by a zealously atheistic Ashkenazi elite, his refusal to adhere to which being the reason for their particular hatred of Ed Miliband - too numerous to bother trying to count.
Roll on the 15 to 20 Respect MPs, plus the same number of Campaign Group members, and the 15 to 20 of ours, plus at least the same number of like-minded Labour members, in the 2015 Parliament with Ed Miliband as Prime Minister. At that point, this rotten commentariat might finally collapse. If we make it. As we must.
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You presumably, and I agree with you, identify Pat Glass as one of the 15 to 20 or more Labour MPs who would co-operate with the same number of Lindsayites, I word I know you are going to hate. After all you have repeatedly said that you intend to vote for her next time and she is well known as a regular reader and strong admirer of yours.
ReplyDeleteBut as you say in another post, there is Birmingham Edgbaston to consider if Gisela becomes police commissioner. Also what if some of our other old troopers retire or are deselected due to boundary changes: Frank Field, Kate Hoey, Roger Godsiff, Austin Mitchell? Do we wait in hope for Labour to select someone suitable, or do we get straight in there with our own candidates?
Have you seen this week's New Statesman? John Cornwell has an article about the Church being divided between liberal "scruffies" and conservative "straights". He calls Damian Thompson "a vociferous straight".
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