Southern Comfort

A few weeks ago, the Brighton Pavilion Constituency Labour Party seemed close to selecting as its Prospective Parliamentary Candidate one Anne Marie Waters. But now we learn that she has resigned from the Labour Party, announcing that fact on a website associated with Anders Breivik. That is appropriate.

A person of clearly considerable, but wholly inexplicable, income, Ms Waters’s main political connection seems to be to a CIA-funded faux-Communist party which is nominally Iranian but based in London. She even gave a leading light of that party as a referee when applying for Labour nominations, which was nothing if not a novel approach.

Ms Waters is herself 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.

She would have been the Whips’ nightmare, using her once-countercultural South Coast base to wreak havoc for the Labour 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.

But that is not going to happen. Anne Marie Waters has given up, not only her search for a Labour seat, but her very membership of the Labour Party, which she had in any case held for only about as long as I have been out of it, a record which she nevertheless felt entitled her to contest one of the most winnable seats in the House.

(I should not dream of linking to her resignation letter reproduced on the Breivik site, but it is completely unhinged, going so far as to blame Ed Miliband for female genital mutilation. This woman’s sense of her own entitlement is not consistent with sanity.)

By contrast, Andy Newman, with whom I disagree about many things, is the Labour Prospective Parliamentary Candidate at Chippenham. A hard nut to crack, you may say. But the present point is that whereas Ms Waters is not a Labour candidate or even a Labour member, Andy is both.

Small-mindedness, narrow-mindedness, closed-mindedness, communalism, sectarianism and factionalism are urban, metropolitan, secular, socially liberal, white and upper-middle-class vices no less than they are anyone else’s.

Urban, metropolitan, secular, socially liberal, white and upper-middle-class small-mindedness, narrow-mindedness, closed-mindedness, communalism, sectarianism and factionalism of the ostensibly left-wing opposition to the anti-war and anti-cuts movements, movements that speak for the huge majority of the population when they are permitted to speak at all.

Especially from the anti-war perspective, that pseudo-Left has reviled Andy as fiercely as it has lionised Ms Waters.

But instead, Labour has shown itself to be a broad alliance between the confidently urban and the confidently rural, the confidently metropolitan and the confidently provincial, the confidently secular and the confidently religious, those confident in their liberal social values and those confident in their conservative social values, across all ethnic groups, across all social classes, and across all parts of the country, even those hitherto as hard to reach as the rural West Country: One Nation.

Andy does not stand much chance of winning. But the impact of the Coalition’s austerity programme on rural communities is very severe indeed, and the cake has been iced by the privatisation of the Royal Mail. There is only one way of voting against these things. Labour needs to be making that case across the countryside, with and through strong local candidates.

It also needs to sure that no one speaking on its behalf elsewhere is in a position to make it look as if it were reverting to its sorry recent history as a service-cutting, privatising, union-busting, liberty-stealing, warmongering vehicle of urban, metropolitan, secular, socially liberal, white and upper-middle-class supremacism and bigotry.

Labour ought to say a very good riddance indeed to Anne Marie Waters and to all her kind. Demonstrably, it does.