In whose interest might Rachel Johnson possibly be acting?
But, even allowing for the fact that Baroness Mallalieu is Labour, enough, enough, enough of the definition of "the countryside" as the Owen Paterson-loving "Devon and Somerset Staghounds", "Exmoor Pony Society", "Novice Hunter Mare and Gelding class", "Game Fair at Blenheim", and so on.
Enough, enough, enough of the identification of rural England's very serious grievances as anything to do with foxhunting, to the ban on which I should add that I have always been staunchly opposed.
Labour has probably forfeited the once-in-a-half-century chance of anything up to 100 previously unimaginable rural English seats next year (although it always wins quite a few, anyway) by its foolish acceptance of all of this.
Most people in the countryside do not give a damn about foxhunting, and half of the rest are its strongest opponents in the entire country. Next to nobody had ever heard of Owen Paterson.
The cuts, and the attendant collapse of the Lib Dems, would have given Labour numerous real opportunities if it had bothered to select local candidates, perhaps even from outside the party in places where it barely exists, and then poured union and other money into spending all the way up to the maximum in places that have often not had meaningfully contested elections in many decades, if ever.
Once elected, those candidates would then have had all the advantages of incumbency in 2020 and beyond, and those against shell-shocked local Conservative and, in places, Lib Dem organisations.
Labour is going to win next year, of course. But it could have done so much more.
Instead, it listened to the Devon and Somerset Staghounds, to the Exmoor Pony Society, to the Novice Hunter Mare and Gelding class, to the Game Fair at Blenheim, and so on.
And it believed them.
They should have listened to you. All of your posts yesterday were hugely important. The people who deprived the parliamentary process of your voice committed a kind of treason. What happened to the bloke they preferred? He is not in Parliament or a candidate for next year but he must be nearly 40.
ReplyDeleteOne does have to wonder as to his crossover appeal. He has never yet shown any.
DeleteAnd you are very kind.
Today's New York Times story wonderful news for the Iraqi Christians and Yazidis.
ReplyDeleteNow we finally seem to have realised that Britain committed a crime when it created Iraq (and splintered Kurdistan among various oppressive Islamic despotisms) we should follow up on that realisation and arm the Iraqi Kurds-our last line of defence against ISIS.
If we're really serious about beating ISIS, that is.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/18/world/middleeast/kurdish-forces-move-to-retake-crucial-dam-from-isis.html?_r=0
Our crime was to have destroyed Iraq.
DeleteOn topic, please.
On the contrary, creating Iraq was the original sin.
ReplyDeleteIraq is not a country- never can be. Multicultural countries never can work-and certainly not ones bitterly divided as the Shias and Sunnis (not to mention the Kurds, oppressed by both across the Middle East.
Under Saddam Hussein, the Shias were starved to death en masse, the Marsh Arabs brutally persecuted and the Kurds were gassed to death.
That's the only way Iraqi "unity" could be achieved.
Now, as David Cameron hints in the Telegraph, it finally looks like we really are going to arm the Kurds.
That's the best "humanitarian aid" we could give the Yazidis and Christians of Iraq.
Kurdistan is the only possible refuge against Islamism.
What do you think that the Kurds are, Quakers? The Christians have the gravest possible doubts about them, to put it mildly.
DeleteWe took out the only bulwark against Islamism, not only in the person of Saddam, who of course would have died at some point anyway, but far more seriously in the lunatic de-Baathification programme.
Are there really any Kurds, as such, at all? Unlike, say, the Palestinians, they do not all speak the same language, or have anything very much else in common.
The several Kurdish languages do not even comprise a single linguistic family. The only definition of a Kurdish language is "a language spoken by the Kurds", who are themselves defined almost, if almost, only as the speakers of those languages.
And what do you think that the United Kingdom is, or that it was a mere 71 years after its creation? Iraq was only 71 years old when we tore the thing asunder. Think of Great Britain in 1778, a very multicultural country indeed.
I am not putting up anything else off topic.