Balance of Power

Without looking it up, can you name the MP for Hartlepool? If you gave any answer, then it was probably, "Peter Mandelson?"

With all four of the Socialist Labour Party's Councillors in the entire country, including a former Leader of the Council, Hartlepool should now be considered the SLP's Number One target seat. No doubt, it already is. The SLP has its imperfections, of course. But Labour needs to be kept on its toes.

Jeremy Corbyn has opened up the debate on economic and foreign policy for the first time in a generation. Before the summer of 2015, Britain had an unquestionable State ideology in international affairs and in relation to the architecture of the economy.

It was occasionally possible to make a small and probably jocular criticism of the Government. But it was effectively forbidden to criticise the State. Corbyn has brought onto the platform the voices of opposition in principle to politically chosen austerity and to wars of political choice.

Nevertheless, Corbyn has overlooked his supporters by appointing his enemies to front bench and other positions. He has permitted a free vote on Syria. He has whipped an abstention on Trident. He has never brought the arming of the Saudi war in Yemen back to the floor of the House of Commons for another vote. His housing and transport policies go nowhere near far enough. He supports the Government's indulgence of gender self-identification. He sides with neoliberal capitalism on the issues of drugs and prostitution.

Corbyn wants a Customs Union with the European Union, possibly even at the price of accepting its State Aid rules. He is open to a second referendum on EU membership under at least some conceivable circumstance, whereas he ought to have ruled it out as a matter of principle. He has accepted some of the Government's baseless and collapsed claims about Salisbury, Amesbury, and Douma.

Corbyn has acted against the social and ethnic cleansing of Labour Haringey, but not to secure justice for the 472 Teaching Assistants in Labour Durham. He has failed to prevent the expulsion of distinguished black activists from the Labour Party on trumped up charges of anti-Semitism.

Corbyn has failed to defend either Kelvin Hopkins or Chris Williamson, in which latter's enforced absence there must not be a Labour Deputy Leadership Election, even allowing for the fact that a Leader from the Left ought in any case better to have a Deputy from the traditional Right, as is presently the case.

Corbyn has walked into the Government's trap over Donald Trump's State Visit, a Visit that is being held purely in order to elicit such responses and thus to shore up what would once have been the Conservative core vote. And he has failed to oppose without compromise any extradition of Assange to anywhere, on any pretext.

Another hung Parliament is coming, however, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it. There is George Galloway at Birmingham Yardley; George's current employment as a broadcaster constrains him from saying yes to this anything up to three years before the next General Election, but has pointedly never said no to it, either. There may well be the SLP at Hartlepool. And there may well be others.

There is certainly at least one. 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. The present MP for North West Durham has never expressed any of the above concerns.

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.