Take Your Pick

It is up to the Labour Party who its parliamentary candidates are, and it is up to the Labour Party who its members are.

I wish Laura Pidcock well. I shall voting Labour next time, regardless of anything else. But the Constituency Labour Party never picked her, it would not have picked her, and it might not pick her. Everyone on the ground here knows that.

There are half a dozen locally well-established figures in the more usual age range, including at least one who is firmly on the Left, and they would have been the contenders if they had had the right chromosomes. But as it was, a generation had to be skipped, the (fairly left-wing) CLP had to be excluded from the entire process, and someone from outside had to be brought in to a constituency where the MPs had always been very local indeed, in order to punish the CLP for a crime that it had not committed.

You see, North West Durham has had a woman MP for 30 years. Since 1987, when they were as rare as hen's teeth, so to speak. It is impossible to see why an all-women shortlist needed to be imposed here, of all places, and that for a second time. In my time, I have voted for both of Laura's immediate predecessors, both of whom were women. In fact, as a Sub-Agent, I once got one of them over half of the vote on a four-way split in what was then still very much a traditionally Tory ward. I have never been forgiven. Ho, hum.

Laura's base of support is fervent on social media, and on the wider Hard and Far Left in the North East, both within and beyond the Labour Party. But the CLP and the constituency are a different matter. Right now, this is three electoral cycles away from becoming a Conservative seat. I should be a pretty poor journalist if I sat here and did not tell you that.

As for Labour Party membership, when I am not being published in The American Conservative, then I am being published in The Weekly Worker. Having boxed itself in by expelling Professor Moshé Machover ostensibly for writing for that latter, although of course not really for that reason at all, Labour is now having to expel everyone who shares that publication's articles on Facebook or what have you. The list of Labour Party members opposed to Professor Machover's expulsion is easily strong enough economically, socially, culturally and politically to secure the transfer of The Weekly Worker to the ownership of something on the model of the People's Press Printing Society. That now needs to happen.

I think that I once had a telephone conversation with the "Head of Disputes", one Sam Matthews. It ended just as I was about to ask if his mummy or daddy was available. One of the Tory Boy interns whom the Corbyn Leadership has, alas, failed to purge from the party's staff, perhaps because there would be no one left, I confidently assert that he has never heard of figures on the list in the above link, such as Geoffrey Bindman, or Avi Shlaim, or Gillian Slovo. It is more than possible that Joe Slovo was dead before the boy Matthews was born.