Saturday 21 September 2019

Raising Awareness

It is perfectly legal to take a day off school. The requirement is 90 per cent attendance. If you were to spend every Friday afternoon, or every other Friday, getting an education instead, then you would be entirely within the law.

I was politically active at the age of yesterday's licensed strikers. There is nothing wrong with that. But no allowances were made, nor should they have been. If you are a working-class boy, or even one who is just not quite as posh, then they still aren't. And that is why, on Left and Right, you are unlikely to think like Greta Thunberg. But it is also why you are practically certain to get none of her attention.

Moreover, boys are quite routinely placed on the autistic spectrum in order to diagnose and treat their political opinions and interests as an illness, not in order to elevate them to the status of sages. Of course, there are also strong class and ethnic elements here.

Both of Thunberg's parents have Wikipedia entries, as has her paternal grandfather. How dare someone from quite so privileged a background presume to demand that our people either go back to, or remain in, our shacks and our hovels? Apparently, she also has an eating disorder. That explains a lot, doesn't it? She can't understand why poor people want nicer food. She's rich, and she doesn't want any food.

The leaders of opposition to wars are the youth, and that is as it should be. They ought to be doing that, not this. If attention were paid to 16-year-olds other than the daughter of Malena Ernman and Svante Thunberg, then that would be the face of youth politics. I'd be on the marches with them, when I had the time and the energy.

I recently heard an ostensibly Corbyn-supporting youth, with that strange new accent of middle-class London, ask in all seriousness whether the miners had been defeated "for environmental reasons", as if the Government and the Police had been the Green Goodies. Of course, Jeremy Corbyn himself, never mind Piers Corbyn, could have set her right.

But what next? Maggie's milk-snatching as a pioneering strike against the wicked dairy industry? Don't laugh, it could happen. After all, although she began to blather on about environmentalism as a means of Socialist control once she had the dementia that also turned her into a born again Eurosceptic, Margaret Thatcher was very Green indeed as Prime Minister, shocking first the Royal Society and then the UN with her passion on the subject.

It has always been right-wing stuff. It is a Yes-No question, "Do you regret the defeat of the miners in 1985?" The tax-exiled proto-Thatcherites of pop music, who are now its grand old men, often thought that they were left-wing in their day. But they weren't. And neither is this.

Another hung Parliament is coming, however, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it. A new party is now in the process of registration. After nearly 30 years of suggestion, speculation, and even a sort of preparation, I will stand for Parliament here at North West Durham. The crowdfunding page is here, and buy the book here. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

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