Coming First

Andy Burnham was of course speaking in a very specific context.

But it is important to remember that Conservative Party activists and their Press sincerely cannot see any distinction between their country and their party.

To them, the two are identical, despite the latter's having been subject  for at least a generation to a wide, yet closely connected, range of controlling foreign influences: America, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Rupert Murdoch.

Yet they refuse to accept the legitimacy of any other governing party.

When in Opposition, they behave as if they were living under foreign occupation. When in Government, they treat all other political forces as if they were fifth columns, even though it is their own party that is both funded and directed by foreigners.

Motes and beams.

For there is nothing more British than the trade union movement, a body of millions of British citizens working and paying tax in the United Kingdom.

Yet, in view of how the British State treats Labour people whenever their party is not in office, it is no wonder that some of them identify more with that party and with the wider Labour Movement than they do with that State.

Something similar, and even more pronounced, is increasingly evident among Scottish Nationalists, who cannot distinguish at all between Scotland and the SNP, in no small measure in reaction against the party-as-country school that now passes for the Tories.

By such means do separate and often bitterly antagonistic peoples diverge from a common stock.

The legacy of Margaret Thatcher and David Cameron might be as stark as that 500 or 1000 years from now. Indeed, well before that, and perhaps even within the lifetimes of those of us who are currently in our thirties.

The signs are already there. The completely different versions of the same historical events have already attained canonical and folkloric status on both sides. 

It is quite clear from the latest buffoonery of Toby Young that both an Iraq Test, continuing to believe that that intervention was morally right and has been strategically successful, and an Israel Test are being applied by breathtakingly presumptuous right-wing media interests to the candidates for Leader of the Labour Party.

That contest and that office do not concern those interests.

Moreover, if they had anything remotely conservative or Tory about them, then they would have opposed the Iraq War from the outset, like the candidate whom they are most determined to damage, while implacably and ferociously denouncing the demand of a foreign state, government or party (in this case, all three) to determine which members of the House of Commons might or might not contest an election to lead Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition.

"The country comes first," said Liz Kendall, interrupting her boss. In view of her base of support, she needs to be asked the question, "Which country?"

America? Israel? Saudi Arabia? The Murdoch Empire, which is a state within several states, including this one? The City of London, literally a law unto itself? Transnational capital, which defines an entire culture the participants in which are well on the way to forming a distinct people?

Which? And why?

It is as fascinating as it is frightening that Young sees no need of any kind of viable Opposition. I am not saying that his view of Jeremy Corbyn is correct. But it is his view.

Young is utterly convinced that his own, basically foreign and aggressively anti-British, tendency will always control his party.

He is probably right.