Sunday 8 January 2017

Over The Ridge

Well, that was fun.

A car crash interview with a Prime Minister who doesn't have a clue.

She is coming up to six months in office, but she has yet to do anything at all.

Her unexpected dalliance with grammar schools lasted about a week before the whole idea was sent back to two newspaper columns, one of which has long advocated a vote for UKIP, while the other has long advocated outright abstention.

Theresa May was sent to a private school in order to get her though the 11-plus, and that did the trick.

But early in her time at her girls' grammar school, that institution merged into the much larger, mixed comprehensive that then sent her to Oxford.

Clearly assuming that she made it to the City of Lost Causes all by herself, she feels no gratitude to her comprehensive school, only resentment at having had to share a building with the oiks after all.

Even though the consequent scheme never came to anything, it provided an invaluable insight into her character.

She has, however, unintentionally created the space for those who have been working for years on workers' representation, pay restraint, controls on foreign takeovers, the shape of a post-Brexit Britain, and a very great deal more besides.

Since Jeremy Corbyn became Leader of the Labour Party, the Conservatives have lost six out of eight parliamentary by-elections.

They have lost over 50 council seats.

They have lost every Mayoral Election, including the one in London, where they had held the Mayoralty for the previous eight years.

They have been forced into 22 U-turns, with more in one a year than there were in the whole of the last Parliament.

As for Labour, the tripling of its membership under Corbyn has paid off all its debts.

It has increased its national share of the vote at the local elections by four per cent.

It has won five parliamentary by-elections, three of them with increased majorities of as much as eight per cent.

But it had been predicted to lose them all to UKIP, a prediction that is being made again about Copeland, Leigh, and Liverpool Walton. Some people never learn.

We shall soon see whether one of those people is Paul Nuttall, with impending by-elections in no fewer than three Labour seats in his own North West.

When UKIP does not win any of them, when Labour certainly wins two and probably wins all three of them, and when Gerard Coyne does not win the election for General Secretary of Unite, then it will be very high time to stop pretending that Labour was dying in the North.

Or that its working-class supporters were exercised much at all by immigration, including in the casting of their decisive votes for Leave at the EU referendum.

Instead, it will be very high time to concentrate on the issues emphasised by Corbyn and by Len McCluskey.

For example, the fact that England's NHS is now in such a state of humanitarian crisis that the Red Cross has been moved to intervene.

On that basis, consider that Bernie Sanders was able to come within one year from 60 points behind the lavishly funded Hillary Clinton, and that in Britain there is no Democratic National Committee to rig these things.

3 comments:

  1. It was at the end of her time there that it became a comprehensive, when she was 16.

    Like Harold Wilson, Vince Cable, Roy Hattersley, David Davis, John Redwood and all the rest she owes her career to a grammar school education.

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    1. That's not the end. And she didn't arrive until she was 13. She seems to have been 15 at the time of the merger, so she was at a grammar school for all of two years. Followed by three at the comp that sent her to Oxford.

      Her parents had previously sent her private, so could presumably afford to do so, especially since it had been to a Catholic convent with no question of a clergy discount.

      It is quite clear that she is very bitter about her schooling, whereas she ought to be bloody grateful. That can be a feature of Oxbridge types, I have found.

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  2. Whatever education system produced May, she is a very bad advert for it.

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