The Lions Roar On

Ever since the coup of 2008, Durham County Council has been under occupation. The nominally Labour Leadership, which overthrew a real one, has no meaningful connection to the Labour Movement. Nevertheless, shame on it for today's latest brutalisation of the Teaching Assistants. Shame on Alan Napier for being the UDM to Simon Henig's Coal Board. Perhaps it is time to re-examine Napier's record during the Strike?

Shame on Ben Sellers, who is now the Political Advisor to Laura Pidcock MP, for having talked the TAs out of the perfectly sensible strategy of simply not voting for any Labour candidate for the County Council this year, and of encouraging everyone else to refrain from doing so, since only Labour Councillors had ever voted against the TAs, a situation that remains the case. Some Political Advisor he is. Had that strategy been adhered to, then the TAs would already have won by now, since no matter what the composition of the anti-Labour coalition had been, then it would have been made up exclusively of the TAs' supporters.

It was most regrettable that the Durham Miners' Association had Henig on the platform of this year's Gala, and it is really not asking all that much that Jeremy Corbyn, Angela Rayner, Ken Loach and other strong supporters of the TAs be spared having to share a platform with him again next year. Of course, not only ought the rat and its lice to have been expelled from the Labour Party by then, but the rat itself, at least, may very well be in prison.

For, in order to manufacture sympathy for themselves among the voters, the TAs' enemies in County Hall manufactured the bogus threat to their own lives. They then sought, as they are still seeking, to pin that piece of nonsense on me. They knew that they could not keep control of the Council by fair means, so they cheated, and in so doing committed at least one serious criminal offence.

They also knew that they could not beat me in the Lanchester Ward by fair means, so they cheated, and in so doing they are still committing at least one criminal offence that carries a maximum sentence of life imprisonment. I could only be convicted by a corrupted jury, and since there is not going to be a corrupted jury, then it is absolutely impossible for me to be convicted. Therefore, this whole business is, as much as anything else, a scandalous waste of public money.

Meanwhile, the Teaching Assistants fight on. They will accept no conclusion other than absolute victory on their own terms, and they are just going to carry on until they get it. They have the support of the entire Labour Movement, including the Leader of the Labour Party. Anyone who does not support them is, by definition, not part of the Labour Movement.

And they have the support of all the non-Labour members of the Council, the Council that those members would now be running if the elections to it had been conducted with any semblance of honour or even legality, and if there had been no distraction by the careerist opportunism that is now installed in the office, and perhaps even in the person, of Laura Pidcock MP.