Wednesday 28 March 2018

Rallying Points

It is a reasonable question why Wes Streeting or Luciana Berger thought it appropriate to address a Conservative Party local election rally. But it is also a reasonable question why the Conservative Party wanted its local election rally to be addressed by Luciana Berger or Wes Streeting. 

After all, it is economically well to their left, since they remain strongly supportive of the austerity from which it is, however slowly, extricating itself. It is also positively peaceable by comparison with their gung-ho global trigger-happiness. But it is preparing to legislate for gender self-identification, to the horror of those mostly pro-Corbyn Labour members and supporters whom they and their publicly funded staff are subjecting to a torrent of abuse.

And it is turning this country into the EU colony and satrapy that some of us predicted, obliged as a colony to keep laws that we will not have had any say in making, and obliged as a satrapy to pay tribute to the imperium, all without even so much as getting our fisheries back, and all without a peep of dissent from any Conservative member of either House of Parliament.

Jacob Rees-Who? In any case, the Conservatives have only ever had two national Leadership Elections, their MPs simply removed the winner of the first one and installed a replacement of their own devising, and even the second, which delivered David Cameron, was 13 years ago and counting. Rees-Mogg would never so much as make it onto the ballot in the wildly unlikely event of a third decision to ask the members, of all people.

Moreover, since those members adore Theresa May, they would presumably vote for the most pro-EU candidate available. Chosen by Conservative MPs, that candidate would be very, very, very pro-EU, indeed. He or she would be committed to the Government's policy of giving people a "transition period" during which to come round to the view that it would be better to join the EU again.

Doing so would of course be on the EU's terms, with Schengen, the euro, the lot. That is very much the position of most of the 20 Labour MPs who this week turned up to the Conservative Party's local election rally, in support of a party that tellingly arranged for the expulsion of a handful of Russian diplomats from a handful of countries to be announced by the President of the European Council.

Still, the pitiful turnout at that rally, for all the saturation coverage in media that routinely ignored enormous demonstrations even on that same site, indicated just how badly the Conservatives were going to do at the local elections in London. As an absolute maximum, there were 300 people. In which case, one in 15 attendees was a Labour MP, and probably one in eight was there as a paid member of the staff of the Israeli Embassy.

What is a foreign embassy doing, organising the Conservative Party's local election rally? What is the Conservative Party doing, allowing a foreign embassy to organise its local election rally? Why did that embassy and that party invite Labour MPs to address that rally? Why did those MPs do so? And why, having done so, are those MPs permitted to retain membership of the Labour Party?

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