If Labour were to lose Peterborough on Thursday, then there would be another attempt at a coup. But that would easily be seen off. And then what would the coup-mongers do? Set up a breakaway Blairite party to sweep the country?
At one in eight, the recent combined vote for the Conservative Party and for Change UK represented the sum total of people in this country who think that the last 40 years have been an economic or political success. Seven out of eight people think something else entirely. Even the liberals who did well were not liberal elitists, but liberal populists. Liberal Democrats, indeed.
Meanwhile, the pitiful showing for UKIP, and the lost deposit of Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, showed the true strength, or weakness, of the expression of such disaffection that usually receives the most attention from the liberal elitist media.
Although it is not going to win, the decision of the SDP to contest the Peterborough by-election is a sign of things to come. At the European Elections, the Brexit Party topped the poll in, for example, every local authority area in the North East. A General Election manifesto acceptable to Nigel Farage would not have the same effect.
At one in eight, the recent combined vote for the Conservative Party and for Change UK represented the sum total of people in this country who think that the last 40 years have been an economic or political success. Seven out of eight people think something else entirely. Even the liberals who did well were not liberal elitists, but liberal populists. Liberal Democrats, indeed.
Meanwhile, the pitiful showing for UKIP, and the lost deposit of Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, showed the true strength, or weakness, of the expression of such disaffection that usually receives the most attention from the liberal elitist media.
Although it is not going to win, the decision of the SDP to contest the Peterborough by-election is a sign of things to come. At the European Elections, the Brexit Party topped the poll in, for example, every local authority area in the North East. A General Election manifesto acceptable to Nigel Farage would not have the same effect.
The comfortable election of Jeremy Corbyn as Leader of the Labour Party in 2015, his thumping reelection in 2016, and the far better than expected Labour showing at the General Election of 2017, have demonstrated the widespread desire for a more egalitarian economic policy and for a more pacific foreign policy, through the democratic political control of the means to those ends.
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.
In 2016, the referendum on EU membership was decided by the families, communities and areas that had suffered the most from the failure of all three parties in government, as well as of all parties that have ever been part of any of the devolved administrations, over the previous 39 years, beginning with the turn to monetarism by the Callaghan Government in 1977.
If we had voted Remain, then Remain would have won. Last month, we reiterated our point by voting for the Brexit Party. But we would not vote in a General Election for a party that, for example, advocated the privatisation of the National Health Service, whether as part of the trade deal with the United States, or under any other circumstance.
We will vote only for people who had insisted from the start, from today, that the NHS and food safety standards were among the things that were simply not negotiable. Those would in any case have been under greater threat within the EU, from TTIP and from whatever attempt will certainly be made to revive that under another name.
Across the three polities of England and Wales, of Scotland, and of Northern Ireland, a General Election can only now deliver a hung Parliament, regardless of who led any party. What matters, therefore, is that our people hold the balance of power.
The three tendencies that matter in British politics today are the resurgent economic and foreign policy Left (even among people who would never previously have described themselves in such terms, as many of them still would not), a strong commitment to Brexit both in itself and for what it seen as representing, and a strong commitment to Remain both in itself and for what it is seen as representing.
Corbyn's Labour is trying to express the first, for all the bother with its own MPs and with attention-seeking figures from the past, some of whom are the same people. The Liberal Democrats are now doing rather a good job of expressing the third. In the large area where the two overlap, then there is the Green Party, which seems to think that there can be these things without industry or economic growth. But that is its own problem, like its love for the EU while hating everything that the EU does. And expressing the Brexit tendency without the Left, there will soon be whatever the Brexit Party had become.
But what of the large area where Brexit overlaps with the Left, defined in broad anti-austerity and anti-war terms? That was where the referendum was won, and that was where the Brexit Party's huge victory was secured. We are victims, rather than allies, of Thatcherism, of Blairism, of neoliberalism, of whatever we are now supposed to call it. And we are victims, rather than allies, of identity politics, of unrestricted migration, of Malthusian and anti-industrial approaches to environmental questions, and so on. What of us?
A new party will be registered in the coming days, even if I have to pay for it myself, ongoing lawfare or no ongoing lawfare. And I will stand for Parliament here at North West Durham even if I can raise only the deposit, which I could do by going pretty overdrawn, although that was not how I was brought up. I would still prefer to raise the £10,000 necessary to mount a serious campaign, but I am no longer making my candidacy conditional on having done so. In any event, please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.
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.
In 2016, the referendum on EU membership was decided by the families, communities and areas that had suffered the most from the failure of all three parties in government, as well as of all parties that have ever been part of any of the devolved administrations, over the previous 39 years, beginning with the turn to monetarism by the Callaghan Government in 1977.
If we had voted Remain, then Remain would have won. Last month, we reiterated our point by voting for the Brexit Party. But we would not vote in a General Election for a party that, for example, advocated the privatisation of the National Health Service, whether as part of the trade deal with the United States, or under any other circumstance.
We will vote only for people who had insisted from the start, from today, that the NHS and food safety standards were among the things that were simply not negotiable. Those would in any case have been under greater threat within the EU, from TTIP and from whatever attempt will certainly be made to revive that under another name.
Across the three polities of England and Wales, of Scotland, and of Northern Ireland, a General Election can only now deliver a hung Parliament, regardless of who led any party. What matters, therefore, is that our people hold the balance of power.
The three tendencies that matter in British politics today are the resurgent economic and foreign policy Left (even among people who would never previously have described themselves in such terms, as many of them still would not), a strong commitment to Brexit both in itself and for what it seen as representing, and a strong commitment to Remain both in itself and for what it is seen as representing.
Corbyn's Labour is trying to express the first, for all the bother with its own MPs and with attention-seeking figures from the past, some of whom are the same people. The Liberal Democrats are now doing rather a good job of expressing the third. In the large area where the two overlap, then there is the Green Party, which seems to think that there can be these things without industry or economic growth. But that is its own problem, like its love for the EU while hating everything that the EU does. And expressing the Brexit tendency without the Left, there will soon be whatever the Brexit Party had become.
But what of the large area where Brexit overlaps with the Left, defined in broad anti-austerity and anti-war terms? That was where the referendum was won, and that was where the Brexit Party's huge victory was secured. We are victims, rather than allies, of Thatcherism, of Blairism, of neoliberalism, of whatever we are now supposed to call it. And we are victims, rather than allies, of identity politics, of unrestricted migration, of Malthusian and anti-industrial approaches to environmental questions, and so on. What of us?
A new party will be registered in the coming days, even if I have to pay for it myself, ongoing lawfare or no ongoing lawfare. And I will stand for Parliament here at North West Durham even if I can raise only the deposit, which I could do by going pretty overdrawn, although that was not how I was brought up. I would still prefer to raise the £10,000 necessary to mount a serious campaign, but I am no longer making my candidacy conditional on having done so. In any event, please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.
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