No Change Here

Change UK has been granted registration as a political party, incorporating something called Renew. When it never elects anyone, then it will be time to acknowledge that the sentiment that it expresses, although sincere, is peripheral and even negligible in British politics.

That sentiment was initially the hurt and anger of people who would have liked to have been Conservative politicians in their own home areas. But they had not come from the right families or gone to the right schools. So instead, they had to try and be Labour politicians in places of which they had never previously heard. They hated every second of it. They still do.

Those people were and are the embodiment of the broken promise of Thatcherism, and now also of the broken promise of New Labour. By now, MPs were supposed to have become suburban, déclassés, ideologically non-ideological (or so they were to have told themselves), barely partisan at all, and as likely as not to be female.

They were supposed to have risen through the state schools, the good but not grand universities, and the private sector, to have taken their places as the custodians of an economic and social liberalism that the use of soft power where possible but hard power where necessary had made unquestionable at home, so that the use of soft power where possible but very hard power where necessary could spread it across the whole wide earth by means of an unquestionable alliance between the European Union and the United States, an alliance with Britain at both its cultural and its military heart.

Well, how has that worked out for them? There are now 10 partially overlapping pathways into the House of Commons, but only one of them goes anywhere near that terrain, and there is no extra room even on that one pathway. 

There are the public schools, and there are the public sector trade unions. There is the full-time left-wing activism of bachelor autodidacts who have rarely or never had day jobs, and there is the full-time right-wing activism of bachelor autodidacts who have rarely or never had day jobs. 

There is Scottish Nationalism as a way of life as complete as being Amish, there is the highly eccentric little world of Scottish Toryism as a way of life as complete as being Amish, and there is rarely or never having left the Welsh-speaking countryside. 

There is the fundamentalist minority among Ulster Protestants, and there is the IRA, even if membership of that now consists of listening to old men tell tales of derring-do, rather than of ever picking up a gun for oneself.

Oh, and there is Remain. Absolute and unconditional Remain. Now, there are votes in that. But the Lib Dems are going to get them. At the European Elections, the Lib Dems might very well come third behind Labour and the Brexit Party. They are certainly going to do a lot better than Change UK.

Another hung Parliament is coming, however, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it. It has become a local commonplace that I am on 30-30-30 with Labour and the Conservatives here at North West Durham, so that any one of us could be the First Past the Post. I will stand for this seat, if I can raise the £10,000 necessary to mount a serious campaign. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.