Never Be Seen

The strike action continues against the supposedly left-wing Green council in Brighton and Hove. Refuse collectors' wages are being cut by £4,000, despite a £4.2 million underspend. The money is being diverted to the Greens' hobbyhorses such as "One Planet Living".

Local residents now compare Brighton to a landfill site. They can scarcely contain themselves as they wait to kick out the Greens. And not only at municipal level. But that is where the Brighton Pavilion Constituency Labour Party is in danger of dropping the ball.

It is said to be close to selecting as its Prospective Parliamentary Candidate one Anne Marie Waters, a person of clearly considerable, but wholly inexplicable, income whose main political connection seems to be to a CIA-funded faux-Communist party which is nominally Iranian but based in London.

She even gives a leading light of that party as a referee when applying for Labour nominations, which is nothing if not a novel approach. But, it would seem, potentially a successful one, at least in Brighton.

Ms Waters is a leading light in the use of supposed fear of Islamisation in order to pursue longstanding militant atheist attempts to outlaw, for example, religious marriage tribunals from meeting purely in order to rule as to whether or not those who had voluntarily approached them might be married with the desired religious rituals.

Muslims are not the only people who have those. Jews would be just as much a target. And the real targets are Christians. There are very strong arguments against Islamisation. Ms Waters does not and cannot make them.

No wonder, then, that she signed a letter to The Guardian objecting to Pope Benedict XVI's State Visit to the United Kingdom, which was at the invitation of a Labour Prime Minister.

And no wonder, then, that her website links to that of the National Secular Society, which campaigns against immigration by Polish Catholics because they are Catholics and by West African Pentecostals because they are Pentecostals. There are very strong arguments against mass immigration. Ms Waters does not and cannot make them.

So what, you may say? It is not as if she is trying to be selected at Durham North West, where, since the demolition of the old Consett Civic Centre, the Constituency Labour Party meetings are held nearby in the self-explanatory Saint Patrick's Church Hall.

Yes, she would be impossible anywhere in Scotland or the North of England. Yes, she would be impossible in many or most constituencies in Wales or the Midlands. Yes, she would be impossible in a sizeable and growing number of constituencies in London. But she is not trying her luck at any of those, is she?

True enough. But the Greens would have been desperate to hold on to their only seat even before recent events, and will be even more so now. They fought hard to win it, and they are going to fight hard to keep it. Anything would be used. Anything at all.

And what if Ms Waters got in? She would be the Whips' nightmare, using her once-countercultural South Coast base to wreak havoc for the party alike across Scottish, Northern, Welsh, Midland and London heartlands, and across those key target areas which may in many cases be close to Brighton geographically, but which most certainly are not so in any other way.

If Brighton really is quite like that, and some of us have our doubts, then it can always vote Green. But, for what must at least be the large never-countercultural population there, the ongoing events throw into sharp relief the imperative of voting Labour. Provided that Labour gives that population anyone to vote for.