Mad Dogs All Round

There is nothing new or surprising about close ties between the glitterati and the Securitate. What is new, but refreshing, is the openness with which Hollywood has made Jim Mattis its hero, and with which Mattis has welcomed that valorisation.

Los Angeles limousine liberalism does not send its sons and daughters to be harvested pointlessly in Syria, Afghanistan or anywhere else, any more than neoconservative pseudo-academia on the other Coast has ever done so. Those sons and daughters come from Donald Trump's base, and to an extent from the base of black and Hispanic radicalism.

Cinema and television made in Los Angeles, as in New York or in London, are enough to make the viewer snowblind. But at least it does snow in New York and in London. In any event, though, such material bears no resemblance to the population of any such metropolis. And the Californian one is by far the most influential. Never call this out, though, in any of the three. You know what you will be called if you do.

Not unconnectedly, one of the many underreported features of neoconservatism has always been its strong hostility to the African-American movements after they called out the hypocrisy of the New York Liberal Establishment over integration at home and over settler colonialism You Know Where. You also know what was shrieked at the uppity black activists who disturbed the Liberal Establishment, just as it has been ever since, including in and around today's British Labour Party.

Ah, yes, the British Labour Party, or at least the Parliamentary Labour Party, which is now barely the same thing at all. With the closure of The Weekly Standard, neoconservatism is lasting far longer in Britain, and especially in the Parliamentary Labour Party, than it has managed to the last in the United States, mirroring and echoing the unquestioned spooks on the opposite benches.

When it comes to foreign affairs and to the architecture of the economy, then Britain does not have Government policy, subject to political change. Britain has State ideology that it is not permitted to question. That is fiercely upheld by most Labour MPs and Peers, and it is upheld by all Conservatives in either House at least to some extent, with most of them downright hysterical at the expression of the slightest doubt about it. Across the media, the same is also true. Corbyn might usefully award peerages to people, by no means only in his own or any other party, who would challenge both the geopolitics and the economics.

Another hung Parliament is coming, however, and our people need to hold the balance of power in it. I will stand for this parliamentary seat of North West Durham, if I can raise the £10,000 necessary to mount a serious campaign. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.