Friday 25 January 2013

Of Questions and Referendums

I seem to recall that the supposedly left-wing BBC billed George Galloway for this week's Question Time. But instead, it gave us some occasional contributor to the Daily Mail about how rich her husband is. She was horrendous, with Anna Soubry hardly, if at all, better.

Since Alan Johnson is on next week, can Galloway please have his spot on This Week? Speaking of which, I laughed myself silly at Shirley Williams: "My party didn't even exist in 1975. Oh, you mean the Labour Party." Neil Hamilton was also on This Week. He is UKIP's rising star, apparently. They will have called up and asked for someone. And UKIP sent them him. Why was the spot not offered to Dave Nellist, or to Bob Crow, or to someone from the Socialist Labour Party, or to someone from the Morning Star, or even to UKIP's very own Ken Bell?

Better still, why not to an MP from the 2010 intake such as Caroline Lucas or Ian Lavery? Or to George Galloway? No party to the Right of the Conservatives has ever won a Commons seat. Ever. Whereas parties to the Left of Labour, with great swathes of Labour itself the consistent and the intellectually serious opponents of the EU, always hold a few in Wales (it is a moot point where to place the SNP, as a party), and currently they hold two in England, notoriously the hardest nut for them to crack.

Galloway would have gone down very well last night if he had been there as billed. Why was he not? Gosh, and that was Weymouth. Jim Knight lost Dorset South last time, and is therefore now Lord Knight of Weymouth. But it is not a Labour target constituency. Why not? Why are there such things at all? No no-go areas. Fight every seat.

Alongside Eric Pickles on this evening's Any Questions will be Charles Moore. I rather like him, but he is Margaret Thatcher's official biographer. Just as Question Time thought last night's effort an acceptable substitute for George Galloway, so Any Questions recently thought that a distinguished barrister who had been a Labour councillor and parliamentary candidate could reasonably be replaced with Douglas Murray.

Where once this country had a noisy Hard, including Loony, Left which was given acres of media space from which to promote policies far outside the mainstream, often including submission to the dominating influence of a foreign power (which may or may not have had any desire to dominate the United Kingdom, but that is not quite the point), so this country now has a noisy Hard, including Loony, Right which is given acres of media space from which to promote policies far outside the mainstream, such as the dismantlement of all public provision and the repeal of all social protection, and including submission to the dominating influence of foreign powers, or arguably of a single foreign power based on two continents.

The Soviet Union no longer exists. Even overt Maoists cannot, on their own principles, advocate domination by China as she is now. Or by Juchist North Korea, even had she the slightest aspiration to such a thing. Similarly, Cuba, or the present regime in Venezuela, or whatever, has no interest in controlling anything in Britain. By very stark contrast indeed, the American and Israeli secular, religious-when-it-suits Far Rights are threats of the utmost gravity, far in excess of any that, just as Enoch Powell pointed out at the time, the USSR ever genuinely posed.

The American end of that operation is not even in government in its own country. The whole thing is closely allied to all manner of unsavoury regimes in the Gulf, in Central Asia, in Sri Lanka and elsewhere, as well as to vile, violent Hindu nationalism in India. One of its most frightening features is its manifest promiscuity, its inherent moral indifference.

Yet these opinions are routinely broadcast as if they were uncontentious and commonsensical. As are the other views held by the same ubiquitous people: the abolition of the minimum wage, the dismantlement of the National Health Service, and so on. That latter is currently being pursued by the Coalition, with dangerous signs that Blairite influence might still be preventing Labour from opposing it properly, a very good indication of the need for a permanent body of critically friendly and friendly critical MPs from within the Labour Movement but outside the Labour Party.

But only in England. On this as on so many issues, people in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are still permitted to live in a recognisably British country. Given the option, so would people in England. What is happening to our Health Service was not in the Conservative or the Liberal Democrat manifesto in 2010; had it been in the former, then there would have been a Labour overall majority.

Therefore, Ed Miliband and Andy Burnham ought to demand, not in 2017 but this year and as early as possible in it, an England-wide, England-only referendum on the Coalition's plans for the NHS. This is, in point of fact, about the constitutional status and the fundamental identity of England as a British country.

The easily predictable result would properly banish once and for all the Loony Right. With its immediate access to both parts of the present Government: Google, for example, Mark Littlewood; read The Orange Book. And with its near-monopoly on access to Any Questions, Question Time, Newsnight, the Today programme, The Daily Politics, and so on.

Those might then let on some authentically British voices, of One Nation politics, with an equal emphasis on the One and on the Nation, and which not only understood that the two are inseparable (the Loony Right fully understands that, just as the Loony Left did), but celebrated each precisely by reference to its inseparability from the other.

14 comments:

  1. Why is Neil Clark never allowed onto the BBC to talk about politics? All credit to RT for having him on almost every week.

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  2. Hear! Hear!

    People who have written far less for far fewer and less diverse publications in far fewer countries seem to breeze on.

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  3. Supposedly left-wing? The BBC is left-wing, but your confusing your version of left-wing (socially conservative) with the usual version (socially liberal)

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  4. "Usual" where? Not within the post-Blairite Labour Party, for a start. When Christian Concern, previously Action for Biblical Witness to Our Nation, is linking approvingly to the latest speech by Diane Abbott, and sharing it via Facebook and Twitter, then it is quite apparent who has won in the end.

    But none of that has anything to do with my main point. Unless all social liberals are by definition left-wing, even when they are the Henry Jackson Society or the Institute of Economic Affairs. Is that what you are saying?

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  5. I didn't say all social liberals are left-wing-indeed, since the invention of the neoliberal New Right (which isn't actually conservative) there are social liberals on the Right, too.

    My point was simply that most people who call themselves left-wing (including employees of the BBC, and, say, the ACLU in the US) would support, say, gay marriage, abortion etc.

    That's the version of left-wing politics people like Peter Hitchens are referring to when they attack "leftists".

    They are not referring to your version.

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  6. They might call themselves left-wing, but that does not mean that they are. How are they, exactly?

    And are they really "most people who call themselves left-wing"? Really?

    Peter, I am afraid, does tend to classify as being of the Left everything of which he personally disapproves. He is far from the worst for that. But he does do it.

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  7. Come on, Mr Lindsay-Peter used to be on the Left-and in the Labour Party!

    He surely knows what he's talking about!

    And he once wrote that Ken Livingstone and his "multicultural rainbow" politics was what the Left had become.

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  8. 1. Many, many years ago.

    2. Quite a while ago now. He has been edging Ed-wards for months. He'll get there by 2015.

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  9. Keep dreaming.

    Did you not see him describe Labour as a party of "fat bourgeois bohemians" who support mass immigration, on Question Time?

    Doesn't appear to be "edging Ed-wards" (a nice phrase, by the way) to me.

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  10. Then you haven't been reading him.

    So described by whom, exactly?

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  11. That was his description of Labour, when talking to Stella Creasy on Question Time.

    Unless he's schizophrenic, he's not edging anywhere near them.

    I'd say he's been on the Left long enough to know why he left it.

    It's rather like breaking up with an ex-you may feel tempted to go back there, until they do something that reminds you why you left them in the first place.

    He ain't going back there.

    the best conservatives are ones who used to be leftists. they understand the enemy.

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  12. He's actually used the phrase twice on TV (I rather like it) the other time was on the Daily politics with Chris Bryant., debating Ed'd immigration policy.

    Why would he need to convince himself? Stella Creasy and Chris Bryant made the point for him, by espousing all the same liberal views on immigration that their "bourgeois bohemian" friends espouse.

    Ah, yes I support re-nationalisation too, but that obviously wasn't a hint that he is considering converting to the Left.

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  13. As is his wont, he was trying to convince himself more than anyone else.

    He has said in his newspaper column that he will support any party that promised to block further deregulation of Sunday trading (already Labour policy) and to renationalise the railways (on course to be a manifesto commitment in 2015; mind you, it was in 1997).

    His oft-expressed scorn for UKIP knows no bounds. Is Neil Hamilton going to be in a UKIP Cabinet?

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  14. The process of rail privatisation is now largely complete. It has made fortunes for a few, but has been a poor deal for the taxpayer. It has fragmented the network and now threatens services. Our task will be to improve the situation as we find it, not as we wish it to be. Our overriding goal must be to win more passengers and freight on to rail. The system must be run in the public interest with higher levels of investment and effective enforcement of train operators' service commitments. There must be convenient connections, through-ticketing and accurate travel information for the benefit of all passengers.

    To achieve these aims, we will establish more effective and accountable regulation by the rail regulator; we will ensure that the public subsidy serves the public interest; and we will establish a new rail authority, combining functions currently carried out by the rail franchiser and the Department of Transport, to provide a clear, coherent and strategic programme for the development of the railways so that passenger expectations are met.

    Laboir manifesto, 1997

    Where is the commitment to renationalisation? Nowhere. Indeed, it *specifically* tells against it by discussing what the regulator will do, which you can oly have in a privatised market. Either you don't do the slightest scrap of research, or you're a fool. Which is it?

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