I have had a good mixed grill, followed by an email from the Labour Party purging me.
Who says that it is no use to anyone these days?
Who says that it is no use to anyone these days?
I tried to become an affiliated supporter through Unite Community, of which I am a bona fide member of long standing.
That may be why it has taken the party so long to say no. But I was autoexcluded 10 years ago, so that's that.
All expected, of course. And it hasn't cost me anything.
Speaking of which, the party is also sending it to me through the post, which makes me think that it has more money than it knows what to do with.
I look at the people who are allowed in, and I enjoy the idea that I am so much more dangerous than any of them is.
If there is a list of those who are banned for life, then I can think of only eight people who are on it.
Six are veterans of Militant, and five of those are elderly, even if at least one of them does look very good on it.
Most of Militant are back in the Labour Party. Many of them never left.
Erstwhile stalwarts are today Shadow Ministers, to the certain knowledge of the whole of what used to be Fleet Street.
Erstwhile stalwarts are today Shadow Ministers, to the certain knowledge of the whole of what used to be Fleet Street.
But then, look at what the people who have long been running the Conservative Party, and through it the country, were doing in the 1980s.
The seventh name is that of George Galloway.
And the eighth is that of David Lindsay.
Blessed be Neil Fleming, now and forever.
I do hope that my old friends in Lanchester Labour Party are not stupid enough to put up Fleming as their paper second candidate next May. Or even for the Parish Council.
They really would not want the election in this Ward or Parish to be about race. And nor would anyone else.
Maybe it's time for you to lay off Neil Fleming, you have completely destroyed him as a political force even at parish level.
ReplyDeleteAs long as he stays out of active politics.
DeleteYou could have been friends if he'd known his place. You were when it seemed like he did.
DeletePeter Hitchens, simply the best columnist in Britain (although Christopher Booker is close) and one of the only reporters to notice why the EU chose Ventotene for their summit on Brexit.
ReplyDeleteHitchens today:""I already knew this, as I am interested in what happened to Western Europe’s Communists after they gave up on the Soviet Union, but how many of you grasped the significance of the location of the Mediterranean EU summit, the bleak island of Ventotene, used by Mussolini as a prison for his opponents?
It was a homage to the Italian Communist Altiero Spinelli, one of the original designers of the EU utopia.
Yet his original politics are either not known to, or never mentioned by, most mainstream, reporters. Why would that be?
My friend Christopher Booker, of course, knew and noticed. See here;
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/08/27/the-secret-history-of-the-eu-written-on-an-italian-prison-island/""
No one is more hostile to the EU than Communists are. Some people are equally so. But no one is more so, and practically no one on the Right has been so for as long. If Hitchens and Booker really believe any of this, then they are simply out of their depth.
DeleteBooker is a satirical journalist, basically a comedian. You are right of course, the idea of Communists for the EU is too ridiculous for words.
DeleteSpinelli left the Communist Party in 1937, when he was 30. He did not die until he was 78. He had been out of the party for four years by the time of the Ventotene Manifesto, which in any case does not awfully much resemble the EU.
DeleteHitchens's claim that Western European Communists became European federalists after the Soviet Union collapsed is wrong, not only in that they didn't, but in Spinelli's case in that he died in 1986, while the Soviet Union still existed.
Western Marxism and Eurocommunism, neither of them keen on the EU (to put it mildly), were not responses to the collapse of the USSR. The first, in particular, was barely younger than it was. Gramsci, after all, died as long ago as 1937, the year that Spinelli left the Communist Party, never to return.
Hitchens says of the leading Leave campaigners: "Al ‘Boris’ Johnson is now a member of Chairman May’s politburo, her creature, existing at her whim and committed to make any failure look like a success. Michael Gove is, I am told, growing a beard. Gisela Stuart has vanished into the jungle of Labour’s civil war. Andrea Leadsom has been swallowed up. As for David Davis, the only real shark in Chairman May’s lagoon, he is mainly occupied fending off his rivals, Liam Fox and Al Johnson." But he declines to mention that Kelvin Hopkins, who chaired Labour Leave, has since been appointed to the Shadow Cabinet.
DeleteAltiero Spinelli? Bloody hell, this is an erudite blog! But Booker, in comic character as a Colonel Blimp, is pretending to see Reds under the bed with this one. And Hitchens, an old Trot, possibly thinks they are really there. The Ventotene Manifesto? You must be one of very few people who've ever read that. I bet neither of them ever has. A fascinating historical curiosity that never had any impact on anything. Like Christopher Booker or Peter Hitchens.
DeleteDo you hate Fleming because you had an affair with him?
ReplyDeleteEuurrgghh!
Delete