Wednesday 18 March 2015

The Northern Powerhouse

That is, the great swathe of the country that is about to return almost no MPs from either of the Coalition parties, or indeed from any other party except one.

The Powerhouse used to be the name of a gay nightclub between Newcastle Central Station and the Catholic Cathedral, with which latter's sound system its own was periodically known to interfere.

Perhaps that is still the case? But if so, then it is not there that I shall be seeking to save one pound by drinking one hundred pints of beer. Thank you so very, very much, George Osborne.

4 comments:

  1. Unite is is prepared to remove the words "so far as may be lawful" from its rule book under a Tory Government.

    Well, if they refuse to abide by the law, they shall quite rightly be dealt with like common criminals.

    Arthur Scargill used to commit these acts of suicide.

    One wonders why they do it.

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    Replies
    1. I really wouldn't go there, if I were you.

      As Dennis Skinner puts it, we have lived long enough to have been proved entirely right about the Miners' Strikle, but Parliament does not know how to begin going about debating mendacity of the scale to which it was subjected.

      One might add, subjected by Leon Brittan.

      I really wouldn't go there, if I were you.

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    2. When the miners were up in court they used to say that they refused to be tried on the orders of Leon Brittan because he was a well-known nonce. Never reported but it happened all the time. Tories badly need to leave the strike alone. Notice how there are no cultural monuments to their version of events, not even now the UDM is in the Cabinet. There is nothing about the behaviour the NUM allegedly engaged in, not in novels, plays, films, TV programmes, memoirs, oral social history projects, nothing. The other side, on the other hand, is all over the place. Anyone would think that only one version of events ever really happened.

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    3. Look what became of the UDM.

      Even Patrick McLoughlin almost denounced Thatcher by name on the Today programme as he extolled the virtues of the railways.

      You are right, the Fleet Street-UDM-Conservative Party version of the Miners' Strike simply does not exist culturally. There are not even dramas from that point of view on Sky, or anything.

      Of course, I already knew about the censored references to Brittan at the miners' trials. I know all the pain and all the glory of the Miners' Strike. Look where I grew up and went to school.

      Now, of course, the truth is a matter of record. She died just in time, and Bercow has repetaedly had to refuse requests to stage a full Commons debate on it, because the system could not cope.

      Still, a South Yorkshire MP as Prime Minister soon. Very soon. Very soon, indeed.

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