50 Years On

Some fuss about a tweet from Jeremy Corbyn on this fiftieth anniversary of the 1967 Abortion Act. Well, that has been his personal view forever. Not that the issue has come up in the Division Lobbies in a very long time, although he has been there for an even longer time. It was of course Margaret Thatcher who legalised abortion up to birth, and it is Theresa May who has undertaken to pay out of the public purse for the abortions of women from Northern Ireland.

That Corbyn is enthusiastically supported by Ronnie Campbell in Parliament and by George Galloway without, and that he was closely allied to figures such as Mike Wood, Bob Wareing and Bob Parry while they were MPs, should allay any fears that he might be intolerant of other views on the subject. He cares that you are sound on economic and foreign policy. For the first time in a generation, those are now the issues that matter, because for the first time in a generation, there is now any debate about them. There is only any such debate because Corbyn won and retained the Labour Leadership.

Bringing us to abortion in Northern Ireland, since it was Owen Smith who recently told the Question Time audience that of course Labour accepted that the matter was devolved, meaning, although he could not quite say it, that change was, as it were, inconceivable. I happen to know why the manifesto ever even mentioned it, the kind of information that will never be available to the Brideshead Boys at the Catholic Herald or the Daily Telegraph.

They are so cut off from the mainstream Catholic Church in this country that they will never understand why American-style culture wars, which have in any case been an abject failure in the United States, will never attract any following at all over here. Or why Catholics, like everyone else, will always vote for Jeremy Corbyn rather than for Jacob Rees-Mogg, who to most Catholics is simply of the wrong class and the wrong party, as he always will be.