The people who pretended to believe that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and who even now are still pretending to believe that President Assad used chemical weapons at Douma, are peddling their equally batty theory about Ian Lavery and the miners’ money. So closed is the world that they inhabit that they sincerely imagine that hallucination to be widely regarded as credible or even as proven. Of course it is neither.
But nobody any longer cares what people like that think, anyway. Lavery is wrong about “medicinal cannabis”, but no more so than the Government is, and unlike them it is impossible to imagine him smoking a spliff for the fun of it. He is right about most other things. He even broke the whip to vote against austerity in 2015, when Rebecca Long-Bailey abstained.
Alongside that of Boris Johnson as Prime Minister, his presence as Leader of the Opposition would consign to oblivion those who, although markedly lacking in meekness, had assumed that they would inherit the earth. Those people are the embodiment of the broken promise of Thatcherism and of New Labour. By now, MPs were supposed to have become suburban, déclassés, ideologically non-ideological (or so they were to have told themselves), and barely partisan at all.
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 guardians 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?
Or else they were supposed to have taken a different path after university and then come up via the all-women shortlist system, which has done more than anything else to turn the Parliamentary Labour Party from 50 per cent Broad Left in 1994 to 85 per cent Hard Right today. The changes to the British economy since the Callaghan Government’s turn to monetarism in 1977 have turned into the ruling class the public sector middle-class women who dominate the PLP, while the wars waged since 1997 have barely affected them, having largely been waged for explicitly feminist reasons, albeit to no good effect for the women of Afghanistan, and to catastrophic effect for the women of Iraq and Libya.
A position of being anti-industrial at home but pro-war abroad is ridiculous in itself, and bespeaks a total lack of comprehension of how wars are fought. But those MPs are Thatcher’s Daughters, unable to understand the rage against deindustrialisation and against the harvesting of young men in endless, pointless wars, and probably unaware of a growing number of young men’s closely connected discovery for themselves of the various schools of heterodox economics, and of the traditional Great Books that, for ostensibly if questionably feminist reasons, have been excluded from school and university curricula.
As a longstanding London media fixture who spent eight years as the Mayor of that metropolis, Johnson does at least have some connection to the world of the Daughters of Destiny and of the Guardians of the Galaxy, even if he is far enough removed from it to drive them up the wall. But Lavery has none. Absolutely none whatever. At least for the time being, one of them as Prime Minister while the other was Leader of the Opposition would largely dispossess the forces of neoliberal economic policy, of identitarian social policy, of neoconservative foreign policy, and yet also of anti-industrial Malthusianism.
Johnson has no ideology. Once Brexit has happened at the end of next month, then he will implement a broadly Corbynite economic programme, while of course claiming that it was something else, in order to hold onto the seats that Jeremy Corbyn’s Brexit debacle had won him. Lavery is the man to cheer that on while calling for it to be taken a great deal further.
Johnson, like Margaret Thatcher before him, can tell the moaning Right of his own party to get stuffed because it has nowhere else to go and because it would be an ignored pseudo-academic fringe without him. Lavery could tell the moaning Right of his own party to do a lot worse than merely get stuffed because it had nowhere else to go and because it already was an ignored pseudo-academic fringe.
Johnson will be 60 in 2024, and Lavery will be 61. But the struggle will still have at least a generation left to go against neoconservative foreign policy and against anti-industrial Malthusianism, against neoliberal economic policy and against identitarian social policy, against the Daughters of Destiny and against the Guardians of the Galaxy. I will still be only 47, and I will be standing for Parliament again here at North West Durham next time, so please give generously. In any event, please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.
Alongside that of Boris Johnson as Prime Minister, his presence as Leader of the Opposition would consign to oblivion those who, although markedly lacking in meekness, had assumed that they would inherit the earth. Those people are the embodiment of the broken promise of Thatcherism and of New Labour. By now, MPs were supposed to have become suburban, déclassés, ideologically non-ideological (or so they were to have told themselves), and barely partisan at all.
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 guardians 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?
Or else they were supposed to have taken a different path after university and then come up via the all-women shortlist system, which has done more than anything else to turn the Parliamentary Labour Party from 50 per cent Broad Left in 1994 to 85 per cent Hard Right today. The changes to the British economy since the Callaghan Government’s turn to monetarism in 1977 have turned into the ruling class the public sector middle-class women who dominate the PLP, while the wars waged since 1997 have barely affected them, having largely been waged for explicitly feminist reasons, albeit to no good effect for the women of Afghanistan, and to catastrophic effect for the women of Iraq and Libya.
A position of being anti-industrial at home but pro-war abroad is ridiculous in itself, and bespeaks a total lack of comprehension of how wars are fought. But those MPs are Thatcher’s Daughters, unable to understand the rage against deindustrialisation and against the harvesting of young men in endless, pointless wars, and probably unaware of a growing number of young men’s closely connected discovery for themselves of the various schools of heterodox economics, and of the traditional Great Books that, for ostensibly if questionably feminist reasons, have been excluded from school and university curricula.
As a longstanding London media fixture who spent eight years as the Mayor of that metropolis, Johnson does at least have some connection to the world of the Daughters of Destiny and of the Guardians of the Galaxy, even if he is far enough removed from it to drive them up the wall. But Lavery has none. Absolutely none whatever. At least for the time being, one of them as Prime Minister while the other was Leader of the Opposition would largely dispossess the forces of neoliberal economic policy, of identitarian social policy, of neoconservative foreign policy, and yet also of anti-industrial Malthusianism.
Johnson has no ideology. Once Brexit has happened at the end of next month, then he will implement a broadly Corbynite economic programme, while of course claiming that it was something else, in order to hold onto the seats that Jeremy Corbyn’s Brexit debacle had won him. Lavery is the man to cheer that on while calling for it to be taken a great deal further.
Johnson, like Margaret Thatcher before him, can tell the moaning Right of his own party to get stuffed because it has nowhere else to go and because it would be an ignored pseudo-academic fringe without him. Lavery could tell the moaning Right of his own party to do a lot worse than merely get stuffed because it had nowhere else to go and because it already was an ignored pseudo-academic fringe.
Johnson will be 60 in 2024, and Lavery will be 61. But the struggle will still have at least a generation left to go against neoconservative foreign policy and against anti-industrial Malthusianism, against neoliberal economic policy and against identitarian social policy, against the Daughters of Destiny and against the Guardians of the Galaxy. I will still be only 47, and I will be standing for Parliament again here at North West Durham next time, so please give generously. In any event, please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.
No comments:
Post a Comment