Thursday 24 May 2018

2020 Visions

If you believe Toby Young's "two letters" story, then you will believe absolutely anything. It ranks alongside the laughable account of how Sedgefield selected Tony Blair that appears in both of the official hagiographies and in his own so-called memoirs. Young did not have the grades for Oxford, but his achingly well-connected father made a phone call, so he got in. That's it. That is the whole story.

Now, if you need Toby Young to defend you against a charge of racism, then you are in very serious trouble. He, of course, is a stalwart of the London Conference on Intelligence, along with the circle around the Ulster Institute for Social Research and the Mankind Quarterly, and along with Emil Kirkegaard, that advocate of the rape of drugged children.

Young himself is a published eugenicist, as well as being a self-confessed sexual assailant and supplier of Class A drugs. Since his media friends are trying to worm him back into public life, it is time to revisit the possibility of his prosecution for sexual and drug-related offences.

Today, David Lammy tweets that, "A lucrative market worth £6bn a year is worth fighting over. Simon Kempton @PFEW_HQ is right to draw the direct link between middle-class people buying cocaine and young, poor foot soldiers dying in turf wars in places like Tottenham. The truth hurts."

Add that to his work on Grenfell Tower, on which he is right; on Windrush, on which he is right; and on university admissions, on which he is so much more right than wrong that the other side has been has been reduced to wheeling out Toby Young; and Lammy's bid for Mayor of London is coming along nicely.

But what's this? On this week's Sputnik will be none other Ken Livingstone, by some distance the most successful Mayor of London to date, and once again free of all party constraint. Will he be making The Announcement?

Of course, just as it was perfectly possible to give a first preference vote to George Galloway and a second preference to Sadiq Khan (although Lammy or Diane Abbott would have been better), so it would be perfectly possible to give a first preference vote either to Livingstone or to Lammy, and a second preference to the other.

A contest in which each needed to win the second preferences of the other's supporters is a contest that London needs to have for its own sake, for the sake of the country, and for the sake of the world.

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