Feeling The Benefits

I never cease to be amazed as to who reads this site, and yesterday’s two posts of my own material have attracted some tremendously exciting emails.

Everyone in the Labour Party always did regard The Guardian as a Liberal paper really (of course, I have known that for half my lifetime), so the vague sense that an alternative outlet for advertising was necessary has apparently being doing the rounds for years. After all, as an almost frighteningly well-placed correspondent put it, that newspaper has supported the Lib Dems at the last three General Elections, so the Lib Dems are welcome to it, as is it to them. It was never family, anyway.

Meanwhile, the idea of seeking more local, working-class, male candidates for safe or winnable seats has also been on some highly influential minds, I am informed, including by the owners of certain such minds. Raw nerves have been touched by the observation that if UKIP and the SLP were what they said that they were, then they would both already be doing this.

UKIPites are a touchy lot, and I am not surprised that they are. Deep down, or even not so very deep down, they know that we are right to question whether theirs is a party of 1980s nostalgia or of serious conservatism, of neoliberal economics or of the economic patriotism without which there is no patriotism, of British and parliamentary sovereignty or of continuing subordination to American and Israeli interests as well as to money markets and to media moguls, of the United Kingdom’s independence or of English separatism.

Deep down, or even not so very deep down, they know the answers, and they know that serious conservatives, economic patriots, upholders of British and parliamentary sovereignty, and defenders of the United Kingdom would be better off hitching, so to speak, their wagons to Ed Miliband, Jon Cruddas and Maurice Glasman. As, in increasing and enormous numbers, they manifestly understand. Forget UKIP costing the Conservatives the 2015 Election. The Conservatives were always going to lose that Election. Labour has now been easily on course to win it outright for years. Not months. Years. UKIP might as well never have been founded.

Bringing us, very literally, to the business of today. We need to ensure a permanently higher rate of corporation tax on the banks and on the 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.

And we need a Government which understands that there cannot be a large and thriving middle class, any more than a large and thriving private sector or a large and thriving working class, without the necessary central and local government action. For example, universal Child Benefit. The loss of which is, obviously, to be felt most severely in the South East, East Anglia and the more affluent parts of London.

Like the 120 or more rural councils in revolt against a Department which, moreover, approves of the withdrawal of benefits from the obese despite being headed by Eric Pickles and despite spending ten thousand pounds per annum on biscuits, those who are about to be cut out of the system deserve strong local parliamentary candidates, either directly from Labour, or where necessary with trade union funding and no Labour opponents, the better to secure election and the better to hold the Miliband Government to account on behalf of all parts of this One Nation.

Just so long as, since the rural revolt is being run from Rutland, the candidate who removes Alan Duncan is as committed as he is to the Good Old Cause, as well as doubtless possessing views on sexual morality and on drugs more in keeping with those of his or her constituents. But those would be whole other posts.