Rhea Guard Action

Chin up, Rhea Wolfson. We've all been there. Many years ago, my own home Constituency Labour Party spitefully refused to nominate me for the National Executive Committee. It was dominated by its intellectually challenged then MP, who soon afterwards became a catastrophic Chief Whip.

Just as I am proud to be banned for life from her party, from the party of the disgraceful Labour Group on Durham County Council, from the party of the MPs who literally applauded a war, from the party of Sadiq Khan's shared platform with David Cameron (as ruled out by Tom Watson on today's World at One), and from the party of Tony Blair, so I am proud to be banned for life from the party of Jim Murphy.

Murphy's parents' move to South Africa in 1979 can only have been a political act. A lot of people were made redundant and did not move to the apartheid state. Specifically, the Murphies wound up in the Western Cape, and they seem to have had something to do with Robben Island while Nelson Mandela was imprisoned there.

In any event, it is worth looking into exactly what they were doing under P W Botha. It is also worth looking into exactly what their son was doing under P W Botha. He was there between the ages of 12 and 18. Culturally speaking, he is more than anything a 1980s white South African, and one raised in a home that had been set up specifically in order to avail itself of the opportunities presented by that order.

The age of conscription into the South African Defence Force was 16, or when you left school, whichever happened later. Murphy's subsequent nine years at university without ever taking a degree indicate that he has never been much of an academic shining light. He turned 16 in 1983. 

Had the apartheid regime still existed in 1994, when it was not long gone, then some sort of rapprochement with it would have been integral to Tony Blair's "modernisation" project. If there was one thing on which Old Labour was united, then it was opposition to apartheid. But the Thatcherite press expressed a very different view. Guess which line Blair would have taken.

Moreover, from September 2001 onwards, apartheid South Africa would have met every criterion, and surpassed most or all of them, for classification as a key "partner" in "The War Against Terror", which my erstwhile housemate, who went on to be the Labour Party's Head of Research, used in those days to say ought to be known by its acronym.

This has just got me blocked from Labour List. Ho, hum.