How The West Can Be Won

"The people I talk to tell me they have more money than ever," retorted the MP for Taunton Deane, Rebecca Pow, to John McDonnell's suggestion that poverty might exist in this country. Do you reside in that constituency, and has your MP clearly not been talking to you? Of course, it was a Lib Dem seat until 2015. Had the Conservatives expected to win it, then they might not have put up some squirene whose education had begun with laying the table and ended with laying ... no, let's not.

Another such is Newton Abbot's Anne Marie N. Morris, whose expulsion from the House of Commons for something that would now have been career-ending in South Africa, the former Rhodesia or the American South I would have moved if I had been a Member of Parliament. Yet another reason, I suppose, to want to send me to prison. What, exactly, are the practical anti-racist credentials of any MP who has failed to Show Racism the Red Card in this way?

Labour is even in second place in Newton Abbot now. But that scarcely matters. Both Taunton Deane and Newton Abbot need to be fought as if they were knife-edge marginals, if not by the Labour Party itself, then by Momentum and its wider network. Jeremy Corbyn's Leadership campaign was organised in the South West by the remarkable George Aylett. There is no reason why two of the biggest stories of the next General Election could not be, and there is every reason why two of the biggest stories of the next General Election ought to be, the election of Corbyn supporters in place of Marie Antoinette and Lurleen Wallace.