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.