On Having Won The Argument

Did Tony Blair's three General Election victories mean that he, too, must also have won the argument, and that three times? But hey, ho. The almighty top of the Conservative Party has simply imposed the Modern Monetary Theory, and the consequent vast spending and intervention, that Jeremy Corbyn could never get through the Labour Party's labyrinthine committee system, insofar as he ever really tried.

Keir Starmer's impending coronation will show that Corbyn never did capture the Labour Party. But who cares? He captured the party that was and is in government. Indeed, not even his ideas did so, so much as those of his more advanced, and often quite critical, supporters. You need to persuade far fewer people, in fact almost nobody, in order to take over the Conservative Party. And clearly, whatever they might say about him or us personally, we have done so.

Economically, this is the most left-wing Government since the month in which I must have been conceived, December 1976. And up here on the newly Blue Wall, we are loving the lengths to which the Conservatives will go to stop us from painting the towns Red again. The Budget of March 2020, and the Government's response to the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic, have ended the era that began with the Budget of December 1976. The Centre is the think tank for this new era. Please give generously.

30 Years On

Today is the thirtieth anniversary of the London Poll Tax riots. Ignore anyone who tries to tell you that Margaret Thatcher was brought down by "Europe". In the extremely bitter chapter on the Poll Tax in her memoirs, she left no one in any doubt that civil disobedience and then outright rioting, at least the former organised openly by the Militant Tendency, had caused Conservative MPs to see their seats disappearing before their very eyes. Accordingly, she contended, they had seized any excuse to get rid of her. She was right. But then, so were they.

Dislike of the Police is usually associated with certain ethnic minorities and with the university Left. But relations with the white working class have never really recovered from the Thatcher years. And the reasons for that were also the reasons why she rewarded the Police so handsomely that they were able to move into the areas that had previously been reserved for the professional classes, who have resented it ever since. All of that is coming to a head now. Derbyshire? Did you say Derbyshire?

Except Through People

Margaret Thatcher never said either "Rejoice! Rejoice!" or "We are a grandmother", so "There is no such thing as society" is the most famous thing that she ever really did say.

In saying the opposite, Boris Johnson cannot have had any intention except to put a very great deal of social distance indeed between her legacy and his Premiership.

The Budget of March 2020, and the Government's response to the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic, have ended the era that began with the Budget of December 1976. And now, this.

The Centre is the think tank for this new era. Please give generously.

An Incredible Job, Indeed

As soon as George Osborne became Editor of the Evening Standard, then I knew that he had his eye on Mayor of London, probably in 2024.

But this year's election has been put back to next year, and today it became clearer than ever that he intended to give that a go instead.

Not for want of trying, Shaun Bailey has never been elected to anything.

Clarifying Various Matters

Anyone who might be minded to take Oliver Kamm seriously on any subject, including anything to do with me, should note his recent and complete humiliation by Neil Clark.

Regnum Defende?

We need the disbandment of MI5 in favour of Police Officers who, while highly specialised, were nevertheless part of accountable community policing. And following the appointment of Ken McCallum as the Director General of MI5, I can do no better than to reproduce this:

It’s been two years to the day since disgraced former military intelligence officer Sergei Skripal, and his daughter Yulia, were allegedly found on a park bench in Salisbury, near unconscious and apparently very unwell. A lot has been said about the unanswered questions revolving around the incident. But perhaps the best of way of demonstrating the peculiarity of the alleged situation is to simply relate, in full, the “official version”. Here it is:

• Sergei Skripal, a Russian military intelligence officer, was found guilty of spying for the UK in 2006, and sentenced to 13 years in prison. 
• In 2010 he was released and traded to the United Kingdom as part of a spy swap. Having settled in the UK Sergei lived a quiet and comfortable life of retirement, so far as we know.
• Eight years later, in early 2018, with a Presidential election looming and just weeks before Russia was due to host the FIFA World Cup, Vladimir Putin decided to assassinate him for as yet obscure reasons.
• The GU, Russia’s military intelligence unit, dispatched two of their elite officers, who proceeded to fly direct from Moscow under aliases they had allegedly already employed and using Russian passports.
• These alleged assassins carried with them two perfume bottles full of “Novichok”, allegedly one of the deadliest nerve agents ever devised. This would be enough to kill around 800,000 people. 
• On arriving in the UK these highly-trained covert agents book a hotel with a CCTV camera on the front door, and the next day, March 3, they travel to Salisbury by train, allegedly to recon the area, then return to London. They are apparently observed by CCTV camera’s the entire time.
• The day following, March 4, they again travel to Salisbury, this time the master assassins walk to Skripal’s house and somehow “smear” the liquid Novichok on the handle of his front door.
• No eye-witness, photograph or piece of CCTV footage has ever been made publicly available to show either of these two men anywhere in the area of Sergei Skripal’s house.
• The whereabouts of the opened bottle of poison have never been established.
• Having applied the poison, the two highly trained assassins do two things before returning to London. 1) They drop their second, unopened, bottle of novichok (presumably enough to kill approx 400,000 people) in a charity donation bin, rather than destroying it or taking it back to Russia. 2) They stop by an antiques store to browse.
• The two assassins leave the country that afternoon, flying direct to Moscow, without knowing if their alleged target is dead, and again making no effort to conceal their origins.
• Despite both handling the poison, and somehow carrying enough of it back to contaminate their hotel room, neither of the men – nor any of the staff, train passengers or passersby who come into contact with them – ever become sick, even though only 0.2mg of Novichok is an allegedly lethal dose.
• Later that afternoon, Sergei and Yulia Skripal are found “almost unconscious”on a park bench in Salisbury town centre. It is claimed this was due to contact with the Novichok smeared on Sergei’s door handle, though reports originally stated neither he nor his daughter had returned to the house, and the timing seems to make it unlikely they did
• The person who found them was the most senior nurse in the British Army (likely in the area as part of Toxic Dagger, the British Military’s landmark chemical weapons training exercise which began Feb 20th and ran on until March 12th).
• The nurse and her family administer “emergency aid” to the two alleged poisoning victims. Neither she nor anyone else on the scene, nor any of the first responders, ever experience any symptoms of nerve agent poisoning. Neither do any of the other people the Skripal’s came into contact with that day.
• DS Nick Bailey, a CID officer is in contact with the Skripals or their home at this time and subsequently becomes ill. It has never been stated how exactly he was exposed. It was initially reported he was a first responder to the scene, but that story was changed and it was later claimed he visited the Skripal house. Despite the alleged lethality of novichok in even very minute doses, Bailey is fit to return home after 18 days.
• Porton Down, the British government’s chemical weapons research centre, is brought in to help identify what chemical – if any – the Skripals/Bailey were exposed to. Within a month they release a statement claiming the poison was “a novichok like agent”, but that they could not pinpoint its origin. How they were able to test for a (at the time) theoretical chemical without having a sample to test against, has never been explained. Porton Down is 8 minutes away from Salisbury by car.
• Nearly four months later, in late June of 2018, Charlie Rowley finds the unopened perfume bottle a full of novichok (whether he bought it from a charity shop or found it in a bin is unclear, both stories have been reported). Upon using the perfume Rowley’s partner, Dawn Sturgess, falls ill. Later that day Rowley also falls ill. Sturgess dies in hospital two weeks later. But Rowley survives. Making him the fourth person in this narrative to survive exposure to an agent lethal in doses as small as 0.2mg.
• Sergei Skripal and Yulia both recovered and allegedly chose to live secluded lives. Sergei has not appeared in public at all since allegedly being found on that park bench. Yulia made one brief press statement. Their current whereabouts are totally unknown. Their family in Russia have apparently been denied all access to them. DS Bailey was initially also keen to maintain his privacy but has subsequently given at least one interview some while after the event.

This is the UK government’s version of what happened. Unvarnished and unsatirised. None of it is disputed, exaggerated or speculative.

If you can see any unanswered questions, logical gaps or peculiar coincidences…you are likely a Russian bot.

Totally Reckless And Irresponsible?

So Ruth Davidson knows where Sir Alex Younger, the Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, lives. Just think about that.

And think about the furious reaction of Angus Robertson, one of the SNP's most prominent enemies of Alex Salmond.

State of Emergency, Indeed

The United Kingdom's death toll from Covid-19 has risen by 201 to 1,429. There have been 159 deaths in England, 22 in Northern Ireland, 14 in Wales, and six in Scotland. That figure for Northern Ireland is enormous, and proportionally the Welsh and Scottish figures are also pretty striking. Why is nobody asking about this?

There are concerning features to our legislative response to this, but some context is provided by looking at Hungary's. Oh, well, Orbán and numerous other nasty elements, at various points on any political spectrum, are no longer legislating for us through the EU. But we are still committed to defending them, and to defending Erdoğan's Turkey as well. Bring on the second Brexit.

"One Nation, with an equal emphasis on the One and on the Nation, using Brexit as a double opportunity, both to reorganise the British economy under State direction, and to begin to develop a fully independent British foreign policy, including in relation to the United States, with military force used only ever in self-defence." Please give generously.

There Is Such A Thing As Society

So says Boris Johnson, and of course he is quite right. And yes, Margaret Thatcher really did say the opposite. But if there were no such thing as society, then there could be no such thing as the society that was the family, or the society that was the nation.

Under Thatcher, there did largely cease to be those things. But the Budget of March 2020, and the Government's response to the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic, have ended the era that began with the Budget of December 1976. The Centre is the think tank for this new era. Please give generously.

Put A Smell On

No one has ever suggested that Gordon Jackson QC liked Alex Salmond.

But Salmond never took his seat in the Scottish Parliament.

That was Nicola Sturgeon.

This Time Next Week

This time next week, the Leader of the Labour Party will be a man whose campaign had received at least one donation of £100,000 from a single individual.

It has spent far more than that, but it refuses to tell us where the rest of its money has come from. Of the hundred grand, though, we do know. Do you know any single individual who makes donations of that size to anything? No, neither do I. Welcome to the world of Keir Starmer.

Starmer began the persecution of Julian Assange, who is globally the most significant of the many and multiplying Dreyfuses that his neoliberal, identitarian, neoconservative and Malthusian position is creating as it lashes out in the throes its dying panic: Alex Salmond, Roger Stone, Cardinal Pell, and so on.

Rape Crisis Scotland has issued a collective statement by the nine conspirators against Salmond, all of them prominent in the circles around the Scottish Government, and one of them directly responsible for providing Rape Crisis Scotland with most of its income.

Their conspiracy included a WhatsApp group, and politically it is still going on. Covid-19 is the only reason why Nicola Sturgeon is still in her job. For different reasons, the same may be said of Arlene Foster. And the rates of death from Covid-19 in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland bespeak the fatal failure of devolution.

The fact that Starmer was a former Director of Public Prosecutions, and especially his record in the case of Jean Charles de Menezes, was terrifying enough to us darkies, and enough to inspire the hope that this year's Labour Party Conference would be given the reception by Liverpool that the Democratic National Convention was given by Chicago in 1968. 

Or that the Democratic Convention ought to be given by Milwaukee in 2020, where it is going to nominate Strom Thurmond's eulogist, a man who opposed bussing for fear that his children might "grow up in a racial jungle", and the man who reintroduced the federal death penalty while promoting the mass incarceration of such black men as might nevertheless have been left alive. 

For most of its history, the Democratic Party has been the most successful white supremacist organisation ever. This year, it is reverting to the type from which it has never entirely departed. And how. It is going to nominate for President of the United States the man who brought back lynching. At least he is not going to win.

Nor, of course, is Starmer going to win in 2024. That would be psephologically impossible. But Jeremy Corbyn's complete shift of the economic debate over the last five years demonstrates quite how influential it is possible to be, and Starmer will have vastly more favourable media coverage than Corbyn ever enjoyed.

Moreover, there is talk of Rachel Reeves, who thinks that we disabled people are abnormal and undeserving, as Shadow Chancellor, with a prominent position for Yvette Cooper, who systematically tried to exterminate us when she was Secretary of State for Work and Pensions.

When it came to those of us who were both BAME and disabled, then Starmer, Reeves and Cooper in power would slaughter us like the pigs that they themselves were, and even out of power they would set a tone under which we would be in constant mortal danger. This time next week, that looks set to be our reality.

In the name of neoliberal economic policy, identitarian social policy, neoconservative foreign policy, and anti-industrial Malthusianism, Starmer will turn Labour into the party, or with the Liberal Democrats one of the two parties, of well-heeled, white, liberal hypocrisy in England and Wales; the SNP has cornered that market in Scotland.

Such Kammites infest everywhere, but in how many constituencies are there really enough of them to make a parliamentary candidate the First Past the Post? 20 in London and 20 outside? There or thereabouts, and the Lib Dems already hold at least six of those seats, while the Greens hold a seventh.

But even under better Leadership than Starmer or than whoever was about to take over from Jo Swinson, the Labour Party and the Lib Dems, like the Liberal Party before it, are really combinations of the think tank and the pressure group. Neither of them has been without considerable success in influencing the party that usually wins General Elections and which is almost always led by the Prime Minister.

There is nothing wrong in principle with seeking to influence them in their turn. But it is inefficient. Why go through a middle man? The Budget of March 2020, and the Government's response to the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic, have ended the era that began with the Budget of December 1976. The Centre is the think tank for this new era. Please give generously.

Triple Locks

Iran should say that it would release Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe as soon as Britain had released Julian Assange.

And Britain should say that it would release Julian Assange at the end of this week unless Anne Sacoolas had been handed over.

In the unlikely event that she were, then it could just release Assange anyway, thereby securing the freedom of Zaghari-Ratcliffe.

Persian Excursion

As hopes grow for Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, then it is time to ask why no British politicians have ever boarded a plane to Tehran with their smartphones in their hands.

Immediately before landing, they would have tweeted that they would not have been leaving without her.

Now lift the sanctions against Iran.

Pushing At An Open Door

With a time indicative of the cabin fever that is sweeping the nation and the world, an email arrives from an old friend who is now a useful source fairly close to the Johnson-Cummings court. He and I both know how hard it is to get money out of rich people. Poor people are far easier, but we can all see the problem with that. Yet in terms of political influence rather than cold, hard cash, I am assured that The Centre is, "pushing at an open door."

This Government would have no quibble with any of the 10 founding principles, apparently. It has shelved gender self-identification after all the candidates to lead the Labour Party have gone and signed up to it. The Conservative Party has never subscribed to the IHRA Definition of Antisemitism, whereas such subscription is now a condition of mere membership of the Labour Party, and the opportunistic weaponisation of that issue against Jeremy Corbyn's party will end once Corbyn himself was no longer its Leader.

Beyond that, "Downing Street could have written" my 600 words. Gosh. Well, I will never again be a member of a political party, and I will never contest another election to anything. So of course I want to influence the Conservative Party. It has won most of the General Elections of the last 100 years, and it has at least come out on top at almost all of them, including the last four.

It currently has a huge majority, and it is bound to win again in 2024, which will give the whole of the Left the pleasure of turning to the Labour Right as I did locally in 2003 and answering "You're unelectable" with, "Well, so are you." Today has shown the Conservative Party with 54 per cent support at the polls, the highest that any Conservative Government has ever enjoyed.

By contrast, the next Leader of the Labour Party is going to be Keir Starmer. In the name of neoliberal economic policy, identitarian social policy, neoconservative foreign policy, and anti-industrial Malthusianism, that opaquely funded member of the Trilateral Commission will be the voice of all that was petty in the petty bourgeoisie, opposing investment along the Red Wall. Starmer will demand British participation in every war for which Saudi Arabia had paid the Democratic National Committee to cheerlead. Without a referendum, he wants to re-join the European Union on every term that it cared to set: Schengen, the euro, the lot.

As Director of Public Prosecutions, Starmer began the persecution of Julian Assange, he refused to bring charges in relation to the death of Jean Charles de Menezes, and he imported Joe Biden's mass incarceration of black men as a means of social control and as a source of cheap labour. Starmer's BAME supporters are drawn from the ageing Afro-Caribbean and South Asian Establishment that is integral to the right-wing Labour machine in certain urban areas. They are irrelevant to the BAME Britain of the 2020s. The Red Wall has not yet fully fallen, and the Black Wall will fall with it.

It is not that I am hostile in principle to influencing the Labour Party, although there will be no chance of that under Starmer. It is that it is simply more efficient to cut out the middle man. As a think-tank-cum-pressure-group, Labour has had a good run since the end of the First World War, and it is having a good run now. The only really dry patches have been the Thatcher years and the Coalition years, when the Conservatives looked instead to Liberalism (as Labour also did under Blair and will under Starmer, although that is another story).

But as an electoral force, Labour's record over the same period has been catastrophic, and it is not going to improve any time soon. I am not interested in exercising indirect influence. These are the facts of life. Love them or loathe them, but they are the facts of life. Please give generously.

The Centre

The crowdfunding page for my new think is here:

The Budget of March 2020, and the Government’s response to the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic, have ended the era that began with the Budget of December 1976. The Centre is the think tank for this new era. It upholds:

• family and community values, by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty;
• social solidarity as an expression of personal responsibility, personal responsibility as protected by social solidarity, international solidarity as an expression of national sovereignty, and national sovereignty as protected by international solidarity;
• equality and diversity as economic equality and class diversity, as regional equality and regional diversity, as the equal sovereignty of diverse states, and as equal respect for diverse opinions within a framework of free speech and other civil liberties, including due process of law, with the presumption of innocence;
• the leading role of the working class in the pursuit of economic equality, the leading role of the working class and of the youth in the pursuit of international peace, and the need to maintain unity within and between them, including against separatist tendencies in England, Scotland and Wales;
• One Nation, with an equal emphasis on the One and on the Nation, using Brexit as a double opportunity, both to reorganise the British economy under State direction, and to begin to develop a fully independent British foreign policy, including in relation to the United States, with military force used only ever in self-defence;
• the leading role, in the building of One Nation, of the people and places whose votes have decided the outcomes of the 2016 referendum, of the 2017 General Election, and of the 2019 General Election, namely the rural working class, and the industrial and former industrial communities that are either outside the metropolitan areas or peripheral to them;
• the sufficiency of the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of anti-Semitism as “Hostility to or prejudice against Jews”, and the need to give a voice to a BAME Britain that is now young, increasingly mixed-race, often in its second or subsequent generation to have been born in Britain, connected to every inhabited territory on the planet, found in every town, and well on the way to being found in every village;
• the scientific fact of binary and immutable biological sex, the priority of defending women’s spaces, and the need to rescue such issues as men’s health, fathers’ rights, and boys’ educational underachievement, from those whose economic and other policies have caused the problems in the first place;
• an approach to climate change which protects and extends secure employment with civilised wages and working conditions, which encourages economic development around the world, which maintains the right of the working classes and of people of colour to have children, which holds down and as far as practicable reduces the fuel prices that always hit the poor hardest, and which refuses to restrict travel opportunities or a full diet to the rich; and
• the full compatibility between the highest view of human demographic, economic, intellectual and cultural expansion and development, and the most active concern for the conservation of the natural world and of the treasures bequeathed by such expansion and development in the past. 

The eventual aim is to hold three conferences per year, and to publish the papers from them. One conference will be held outside London, one in London, and one outside Britain. Initially, these will form a three-year cycle, with the first conference to be held in the North West Durham parliamentary constituency. Please contact the Director of The Centre, David Lindsay, on davidaslindsay@hotmail.com.

Lovely Jubbly?

Ol Boy has deleted his "Mum said me, on 'er deafbed" tweet, "Last thing Christopher Hitchens ever said to me was to urge us to keep on Galloway's case."

But at the London Mayoral Election, he can render filial piety to that Robin Leach, British but famous only in America.

Oliver Kamm's practice of sending (signed) bullying correspondence on Times headed notepaper strongly suggests that he works in London, and is therefore eligible to contest that election against George Galloway.

If he is not, then Nick Cohen certainly is, as Rodney to Kamm's Del Boy. I have a feeling that the deleted tweet might even have been addressed to Cohen. 

The pair of them need to get out their Reliant Regal and tour the metropolis to drum up support. Perhaps with Francis Wheen as the Grandad or Uncle Albert character.

No, I Have Not "Become A Tory"

I will never again be a member of a political party. And I will never contest another election. 

But I will always vote, as I always have; I have never missed a vote, for anything. And I certainly will not vote for any parliamentary candidate who even pretended to believe that Keir Starmer ought to become Prime Minister.

In the meantime, I am setting up a think tank. I really would not mind which party that influenced, but there is no escaping the fact of which party is going to be in government until 2029 at the earliest.

Life And Times

Most people think that Britain has had abortion on demand for 53 years. In practice, it has had. 

The law is phrased in such a way as to establish that, but without appearing to do so to people who were reading at speed or who were seeing only what they wanted to see. 

30 years ago, the Thatcher Government even abolished the upper time limit completely, again without appearing to do so if you were determined to pretend to yourself that it had not happened.

But there will be no such subtlety for Northern Ireland. It is to have one of the most liberal abortion laws in the world, from Day One, right there on the page in plain English.

By the way, the 1967 Abortion Act was barely noticed at the time. You have to scour specialist Catholic publications for very much mention of it, and well under one in 20 MPs voted against it.

None of the 1960s Permissive Society legislation formed any part of Roy Jenkins's reputation until the 1980s, when his opponents on other issues decided to pretend that they had been "misled" or "deceived", a trick that they were later also to pull about the EU.

Although not sufficiently "misled" or "deceived" to do anything about it, then or now. Quite the reverse in fact. As, today, we see. Again.

What Goes Around

Alex Salmond's lead defence counsel was Gordon Jackson QC, who is the Dean of the Faculty of Advocates.

In 2007, Jackson lost his seat as the Labour Member of the Scottish Parliament for Glasgow Govan. Specifically, he lost it to Nicola Sturgeon.

Scotland is great fun. Great, great fun.

Self-Service

Better late than never, but why didn't Rishi Sunak do this from the start? I mean, he is good. A potential Prime Minister, in fact. I like him a lot. But why didn't he do this from the start?

People have been advocating from the start what has been announced today. It was not "too complicated" for them. Nor has complexity been any bar to anything so far. Many a Gordian Knot has been sliced straight through.

People who have been underreporting their incomes are now going to get their comeuppance. But no one will get anything until June, and you have to have a tax return for 2018-19 even if you have only just started trading. This Government has invested too much political capital in Universal Credit to abandon it and start again.

But things move so far and so quickly these days that you never know. Look what we have already achieved, not least by having the unions in government. The Universal Basic Income is now well within our grasp. Once this was over, then it would remain, as the floor below the Jobs Guarantee of the Modern Monetary Theory that has become the common sense of this new age.

And is this the end of the lower National Insurance contributions for the self-employed? That might be enough to force a political reconsideration of National Insurance itself. It is a tax, not an insurance scheme or a pension scheme. And it is a tax on work; on having job or on employing someone, including yourself.

The Proper Approach

"What is going on in the UK is, I think, the proper approach. That is the direction I think we should have gone." So says Bernie Sanders. He is wrong about a lot. But not about this.

So much for Keir Starmer's and his supporters' hopes of a Government of National Unity. You are far too right-wing. Go back to the ended era that ran from the Budget of December 1976 to the Budget of March 2020. We are all Modern Monetary Theorists now.

Denis Healey also pretended that his measures were a temporary response to a crisis. Yet they ran for 44 years until they were consigned to the dustbin by a Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer who had not been born until four years after they had been introduced. But consigned to the dustbin they have now been.

Turn Again

When George Galloway and I disagree, then we really do disagree. But that does not happen very often, and I still wish that he had contested Birmingham Yardley last year. He would have won, and so would we all. Still, he is now quite openly standing for Mayor of London at next year's election, and who knows? 

This site predicted George's victory at Bradford West in 2012, and I also did so in much-derided comments elsewhere, but everyone who was on a salary for it predicted that he would lose his deposit and that the whole thing would be his last hurrah. Well, it turns out that at 23 years his junior, I have retired from electoral politics before he has.

As George won Bradford West, so he could win London. Although Imran Hussain has since gone on to be a good MP for Bradford East, the Labour shortlist had been designed to placate the various factions of the Pakistani baradari system, which is in fact the carrying over of ancestral caste into Indo-Islam. Caste itself also persists even among Sikhs, founded though they were in a rejection of it, and among people whose families have been Christian for many generations, even centuries. 

Baradari, however, just did not interest second or third generation Bradfordians whose first language was English and who easily passed any cricket test, but who were far more interested in football. Moreover, the concentration on it alienated everyone else. In 2012, George topped the poll in every ward of Bradford West, including those which were more than 90 per cent white. The seat itself had been a Conservative target only two years earlier.

The franchise for the London Mayoral Election is the local government franchise, which is significantly broader than the parliamentary franchise. As George bypassed the baradari in Bradford, so he could bypass it and everything like it in reaching a BAME London that was young, increasingly mixed-race, often in its second or subsequent generation to have been born in Britain, and connected to every inhabited territory on the planet. It should be said that that is now BAME Britain in general, which is already found in every town, and which is well on the way to being found in every village.

330 registered electors have to sign a London Mayoral candidate's nomination papers, 10 from each of the 32 London Boroughs and 10 from the City. George managed that last time, and when he manages it again this time then it will be clear that a formidable movement was already in existence, waiting to be activated. Even seats on the City of London Corporation will be within reach.

Meanwhile, candidates for Mayor of London must be, "registered to vote in London, or have lived, worked, rented or owned property in London for the past 12 months." Oliver Kamm, that means you. Or if somehow it did not, and you certainly send letters on Times headed notepaper that suggests that you do indeed work in London, then it would be over to Nick Cohen. Put up or shut up. Virus or no virus, the next 13 months just got very interesting indeed.

In The House, Even If From Home

The electronic means are now available.

Consider the Covid-19 pandemic itself. Then consider the curtailments on civil liberties, however necessary, in order to address it.

This is exactly when Parliament should be sitting. Every day.

The Big Cat Hunts Again

I had been wondering when he was going to say this out loud. He had been dropping very broad hints for a quite a long time. And this is as good as an announcement. George Galloway will be standing for Mayor of London next year.

"Mum said to me, on 'er deafbed," tweeted Oliver "Del Boy" Kamm four years ago. Or words to that effect, "Last thing Christopher Hitchens ever said to me was to urge us to keep on Galloway's case."

Well, Ollie Boy, put up or shut up. Dare to face George on the campaign trail and at the ballot box. If your answer were that you no longer lived in London, then it would be over to Nick Cohen.

Oh, Jeremy Corbyn

You gave Britain an economic policy debate for the first time in a generation, and a foreign policy debate for the first time since the War.

But you seemed to go out of your way to alienate those who welcomed that, and to indulge those who wanted to destroy it.

Uncrowned By The Coronavirus?

Convincing or otherwise, there are reasons to want to abolish the monarchy.

This is not one of them.

Et In Hora Mortis Nostrae

Nine months to go until Christmas. Happy New Year, as this would once have been.

One really ought to get the Angelus in at the right times on this if on no other day of the year, and I have managed two out of three so far.

The first half of the Hail Mary is of course a combination of two verses from Saint Luke's Gospel. But the second half was added by popular practice during the Black Death.

So saying it a total of nine times is particularly apposite today.

Holden Up Well

Good stuff from Richard Holden at Prime Minister's Questions, and the right answer from Boris Johnson.

The first major campaign in which I was ever involved, including my first ever appearance on television, was in defence of Shotley Bridge Hospital. Well over 20 years later, my view remains fundamentally unchanged. 

That site is coming to the end of its natural life. These things happen. But the proximity of the Lanchester and Langley Park areas to Dryburn, and the relative proximity of the Stanley area both to Dryburn and to Chester-le-Street, mean that at least the same range of services must be relocated within the Consett area.

Fresh from his successes on the taxation of motorhomes (the manufacture of which is a major employer in this constituency), and on the bizarre levying of business rates on public conveniences, Richard is clearly determined to make that happen. 

Of course, come 2024, then he must be judged on whether or not he had done so, and on whether or not he had made good his promise to bring the Metro to Consett, to which it should have gone in the first place. But he is obviously getting on with it.

Identity Politics

Of course there is going to be no reduction in the number of MPs. The Conservatives won big under the present boundaries, so expect only the odd tweak to those. They would be far less wise if they were to go ahead with voter ID.

In the constituencies that in 2019 the Conservatives won either for the first time in many decades or for the first time ever, voter ID would heavily favour the people who still voted Labour.

It would favour them over those who had risen in revolt from the other side of the desk against the people who, armed with the full power of the State, had been patronising them, ordering them about, and sanctioning them.

In the seats that the Conservatives won and must hold, being middle-class is a public sector, Labour-voting thing. The voters that the Conservatives won, thereby tipping the seats, were disproportionately non-drivers who did not travel abroad.

The drivers who did travel abroad still voted Labour, and they will do so again in 2024. Not much could lose the Conservatives that General Election, but this just might. It would certainly cut their majority very drastically indeed.

And When You Get The Chance

ABBA on the radio: "You are the Dancing Queen, young and Swede, only 17." 

Right when Greta Thunberg gets Covid-19, self-isolates, and is cured, all in 45 minutes flat.

See that girl, watch that scene.

As Safe As Houses

Never mind extending the notice period from two months to three.

This is our chance to get rid of so called "no fault evictions" once and for all. 

Once they were gone, then there would be no politically feasible way of ever bringing them back.

Healthy Developments

Private healthcare nationalised. Take that, Tony Blair and Keir Starmer.

And when this is over, then the 250,000 NHS volunteers ought to become paid employees on Living Wages. 

The work and the money are obviously both there. As some of us have been trying to tell you for years.

Mind Your Language

I am now the proud owner of Accidence Will Happen, by Oliver Kamm. 

Including the £2:80 postage and packing, it has cost me the three pounds that I might otherwise have spent on a Tesco meal deal. None of those 300 pennies has gone to Kamm.

I fully intend to read it. Peter Hitchens says that it is a good book, so it probably is. And all for 20p. Not even five per cent of which will ever be paid to Oliver Kamm.

Forward To Basics

Rishi Sunak is just delaying the inevitable. There is no other solution than the Universal Basic Income. 

I wonder whether the Government might not be having trouble hammering out the details with the Labour front bench? A lot of Conservative and Labour backbenchers (and frontbenchers) are very opposed to UBI.

Significant Dissatisfaction

I told that now it would all kick off in the SNP. And it is doing.

Joanna Cherry is one of the good ones: on the left of the party, she has no truck with gender self-identification, and she stood by Alex Salmond from the start.

I would die in the last ditch against Scottish independence, but even so.

By Eck

When it comes to faction-fighting, then the SNP makes either Labour or the Conservatives look like a model of blissful harmony. 

And it is all going to kick off now.

Starmering To The Grave

No, of course Keir Starmer is not planning to sack the Labour Party's staff. Why would he do that? The founding failure of Jeremy Corbyn's Leadership was that he did not sack the staff, who have since spent five years trying to sack him instead. Starmer is a Messianic figure to them, and he is literally a friend of their parents.

I wholeheartedly support the election of Keir Starmer as Leader of the Labour Party. If that party were to be given a grave, then, like Charlie Chaplin, I would dance around my walking stick upon it. That day is already close at hand.

But nothing would hasten it more than the Leadership of the man whose views on spending, on Brexit and on net zero carbon would lose Labour another 100 seats in Wales, the Midlands and the North, while his record as Director of Public Prosecutions would lose it a BAME Britain to which his supporters among the ageing Afro-Caribbean and South Asian grandees were as irrelevant and even repugnant as their allies and contemporaries in the metropolitan liberal elite and in the right-wing Labour machine were to the former Red Wall.

Hunt Balls

I preferred foxhunting to the Iraq War, support for which the hunting ban bought among despicable Labour MPs. No such ban has ever existed in practice, anyway.

And I am the first to prefer game to broiler chicken, on both culinary and ethical grounds.

But that widespread hypocrisy among the Starmering Classes is as nothing compared to the present hypocrisy in the newspapers of the hunts and of the shooting parties.

"The dirty Chinese eat wild animals," don't you know? Imagine that. Eating wild animals.

Hold The Sunset

Tomorrow's legislation needs a greatly strengthened sunset clause. This is what we pay an Opposition for. 

But three months ago, we were told that universal free broadband within 10 years would bankrupt the country.

As would a four-day week by sometime around 2050.

And as would four additional Bank Holidays, three of which would have fallen about now.

The money was always there, brothers and sisters.

The money has always been there. And it always will be.

Be Prepared?

Did the Czechoslovak Secret Service really seek to recruit Enoch Powell in order to influence the Boy Scout movement? No, of course not. For one thing, Powell saw through the Cold War from the start. 

The only two British MPs ever known to have been on the books of any Eastern Bloc country, and in both cases it was indeed Czechoslovakia, were the conventionally Hard Right Conservative Ray Mawby, and John Stonehouse, who still has a reasonable claim to have been the most right-wing Labour MP ever, again including from the point of view that he was a dyed-in-the-wool Cold Warrior.

Did the Czechoslovak Secret Service really seek to recruit Enoch Powell in order to influence the Boy Scout movement? I ask you!

Of Self-Employment and Self-Determination

The solution to the question of what to do for the self-employed, and for those whom the Department for Work and Pensions had kept either on JSA or on ESA, is of course the Universal Basic Income. Once that had been introduced, then there would be no politically feasible way of getting rid of it. 

UBI would not be a disincentive to work in ordinary circumstances. Rather, it would put a floor under the Jobs Guarantee of the Modern Monetary Theory that has in recent days moved from being the stuff of controversy to providing the defining parameters of the debate.

We can do this. We are now within touching distance of it. Look what we have achieved in the last week alone. Above all, "we" have been the trade unions, who have been brought into government and who are making the most of if before things became more difficult again under a Leader of the Opposition who was more to the taste of most Labour MPs.

Next up, university admission after results, as in any sane country. And the end of the school league tables, which could not be taken seriously on the basis of teacher assessment alone, and which once gone for a year need never come back. Working-class pupils are twice as likely to be predicted an E grade, and black pupils' grades are staggeringly under-predicted, with only 39 per cent of predictions turning out to have been correct.

13 years of Labour Government did nothing to improve any of this. Quite the reverse, in fact. The people who make these mistakes are the backbone of the Labour Party's membership, and their children are the direct beneficiaries of the present system. The next Leader of the Labour Party is the Leader of the Opposition to the Government's programme of investment in the old Red Wall, he wants to reverse the working class's decisive vote for Brexit, and he was a viciously racist Director of Public Prosecutions, as if there could be any other kind.

In The Great Scheme

Had the General Election gone the other way, then the response to the present crisis would have been more or less the same.

Everything that Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell have been saying forever about how global capitalism would collapse is coming true, yet Labour's sellout over Brexit has cost it the chance to be in government.

But there is really only one possible response to that collapse, so the tragedy is only for the Labour Party, which is the smallest of things in the great scheme.

Happy Nowruz

Lift the sanctions against Iran.

Golden Hair

The Golden Rule of British Politics, exemplified in style at the moment, is that "madness" and "treason" become common sense and patriotic duty as soon as Boris Johnson says them or does them. Thank goodness that he is saying and doing the right things.

"What If Corbyn And McDonnell Had Won?"

It would have been much like this, for all that it is McDonnell's job to demand more today. He might very well get it, anyway.

Now, if Cameron and Osborne had still been there, or if Starmer had been in office with whoever would have been his Chancellor, or if we had still had a Government with the Liberal Democrats in it, then we really would have been in trouble.

Centrists cannot learn. Their view is entirely inflexible. Everyone else is an "extremist".

Who Is Taking Umbridge?

The sacked staff of the Coylumbridge Aviemore Hotel have been evicted from their accommodation. 

So, who is being moved into it in their place?

Grinding The Graun

Of course The Guardian is angry. Five years ago, pro-austerity, socially liberal, militarily hawkish globalists (and therefore, among other things, lovers of the EU) ran all three parties, and they assumed that they always would. But now, there are only two parties, and people like that are not running either of them.

They will get the Labour Party back soon enough, as if anyone would want that anymore. And both parties are socially liberal. But this Government is economically to the left of the last Labour manifesto, it is in any case electorally dependent on seats that had voted for Jeremy Corbyn when Labour had still been pro-Brexit, and it is no more likely to launch a war than he would have been. So yes. The Guardian is very, very, very angry, indeed.

Waging No More?

Someone was going to have to be the first Prime Minister who was younger than I was. Last week's Budget, ending the era that had begun with the Budget of December 1976, made a very strong case for who that was going to be. And as of today, there can be no remaining doubt. Rishi Sunak has changed the weather. This crisis will pass. But as Milton Friedman said, "Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program." And we are about to get a very great many of those.

Today is Saint Cuthbert's Day. When he did self-isolation, then he did it properly. If the Universal Basic Income were indeed to be brought in, and it will have to be so soon enough, then I might emulate him. You need not bother sending the King to beg me to emerge back into the world and become a bishop. Cuthbert was dead within three years of having said yes to that one. Leave me alone. Alone with the irony that there had been no church services over Easter 2020, when Pontius Pilate had been proved right all along. Now wash your hands.

Direction of Travel

The lifting of the early morning restrictions on the older person's bus pass in Manchester is obviously to be welcomed. But why is that not happening everywhere? And why have there ever been such restrictions outside London, when there are none such there?

Both the Freedom Pass and the Oyster card should be made national, as stops on the journey to free public transport. The Government has stopped pretending that a sovereign state with its own free floating, fiat currency was financially dependent either on taxation or on borrowing. To fight wars, it never has pretended that.

Finding The Lost Key

At first glance, the Government's list of key workers might look like a long-winded way of saying "the public sector". But great tracts of it have been privatised by all three parties over the last 40 years.

After the trouble that trying to work around that is going to cause now, then no more of it ever will be, and as much of it as humanly possible will somehow be renationalised, regardless of who was in government.

Take Back Control, indeed.

Boom, Indeed

What a heroine Suzanne Moore is. Everyone knows that she is right, of course. 50 years from now, nobody who was then under 30 or even under 40 will believe that any of this had ever happened. "But a man in a dress is just a man in a dress," they will say. Quite. 

Owen who? He has never got over having been relegated to the warm-up man by Jeremy Corbyn in the summer of 2015. Until then, Jones had always been the star turn. Five years later, and he is almost never on television anymore. 

But I do not know who some people think has been in government for the last 10 years. I carry no candle either for The Guardian or for the Labour Party, but at least each of them is having a row over this. In the party that is preparing to legislate for it, there would be appear to be no dissent whatever.

Universal, Basic

What frightens Iain Duncan Smith, who was once so promising, is the realisation that once there were the Universal Basic Income, and bans on most sorts of eviction, and all of the rest of those measures, then there would be no getting rid of them. And as the Conservatives hit 52 per cent in the polls, then Boris Johnson now has it within his power to reduce the Labour Party to the remnant presence of its Irish and Israeli namesakes, simply by issuing a single press release with six points.

First, beginning on Thursday 6th May 2021, all English local elections would henceforth be held on the same day, every four years, with each of us voting for one candidate, and with the requisite number of councillors for each ward elected at the end. Secondly, recalling Disraeli’s doubling of the electorate, while parliamentary candidates would henceforth have to be British citizens in Great Britain, or British or Irish citizens in Northern Ireland, there would no longer be any nationality requirement to vote in parliamentary elections, nor any nationality requirement either to vote or to stand in local elections.

Thirdly, at each of the Conservative Party’s top 100 target seats in 2024, and wherever a Conservative MP was retiring, then the Conservative candidate would have to have lived there throughout the 15 years prior to the General Election, and would have to have an annual income not higher than £12,500. Fourthly, where more than one such person applied to be the candidate, then the constituency association’s shortlist of two would be put out to a binding, independently administered ballot of all parliamentary electors in the constituency, while that same system would also be used to chose future Leaders of the Conservative Party across the party’s top 100 target and its 100 most marginal seats.

Fifthly, the Mineworkers’ Pension Scheme dispute would be settled on the mineworkers’ terms, while the County Durham Teaching Assistants’ dispute would be settled, by central government intervention, on the terms set by the County Durham Teaching Assistants’ Activists Committee, mentioning in passing that it was under this Government that coal mining had returned to County Durham, specifically to the North West Durham constituency.

And sixthly, unless they had said no within six hours of the announcement, then certain people would now be Visiting Fellows of the Downing Street Policy Unit, to publish through it with the approval both of its Director and of Dominic Cummings, not as an expression of government policy, but because what they were saying made a useful contribution to the debate. Each would receive an annual honorarium of £12,000, while remaining perfectly free to publish elsewhere in other capacities. They would include the 20 Founding Signatories to The Full Brexit. A further 20 names are also readily available.

Who needs a party? We get to decide which of them should win. That gives us far more power, and we must be unapologetic about using it. In order to win a General Election, then either Labour or the Conservatives must uphold family and community values by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty. And either Labour or the Conservatives must look after the rural working class, and the industrial and former industrial communities that were either outside the metropolitan areas or peripheral to them.

It is obvious which party is currently passing those tests, both nationally and here at North West Durham. Strongly supported by Richard Holden MP, the Government has formally accepted Modern Monetary Theory, it has effectively reversed New Labour’s surrender of control over interest rates, it is looking to expand its existing programme of renationalisation, it is bringing the trade unions into government, and it is edging towards the introduction of the Universal Basic Income. In the absence of a candidate even closer to my views, then this veteran of the Postliberal Left will be voting for Richard Holden in 2024.

Feeling Tulsi, Looking Gabbard

"Tulsi" should now be an adjective. As should "gabbard". But what should each mean, and why?

The Democratic Party simply has to go. Taking its British Labour fangirls of all genders with it.

The Lanchester Review: What the Coronavirus Emergency Has to Do with Biden vs. Sanders

Norman Solomon, of course.

Although it has no money, The Lanchester Review also has no line. Please send anything between 300 and 3000 words to davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

As It Was In The Beginning?

The Eurovision Song Contest? That was the sort of thing that the Prophets foresaw being held in the End Times, not cancelled because of them.

This is the End of the World? This? I am going to be re-reading the relevant passages of the Bible, which seem to promise rather more excitement than they are now delivering.

Arena Views

Following the conviction of Hashem Abedi, then it is time for a full examination of the British Government's decision to turn Manchester into the world centre of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group.

And following the release, of sorts, of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, then it is time to ask why no British politicians have ever boarded a plane to Tehran with their smartphones in their hands, so that, immediately before landing, they would have tweeted that they would not have been leaving without her.

And Who's Going To Pay For This?

The issuing of currency is an act of the State, which is literally the creator of all money. A sovereign state with its own free floating, fiat currency has as much of that currency as it chooses to issue to itself.

All wars are fought on this understanding, but the principle applies universally. The State also has the fiscal and monetary means to control inflation, means that therefore need to be under democratic political control in both cases.

Last Tuesday, it was controversial to say these things. But today, the only dissent from them is on the part of four of the remaining five Labour MPs, those being the four who do not know what the words mean.

Not only has this Conservative Government formally accepted Modern Monetary Theory, but it is has effectively reversed New Labour's surrender of control over interest rates, it is looking to expand the renationalisation programme on which it had already embarked, it is bringing the trade unions into government, and it is edging towards the introduction of the Universal Basic Income.

The Durham Miners' Gala has been cancelled. Previously, only the two World Wars and two national strikes have managed that since it had started in 1871. But coal mining itself is back, and specifically it is back in County Durham. Here in North West Durham, in fact. In Richard Holden's constituency.

Richard is a strong and articulate supporter of this Government's recognition that the Brexit for which this and the other seats that decided the General Election voted (seats that had voted for Jeremy Corbyn when Corbyn had still been committed to Brexit) provides a double opportunity, both to reorganise the British economy under State direction, and to begin to develop a fully independent British foreign policy, including in relation to the United States.

By the starkest of contrasts, all three candidates to lead the Labour Party have said that the litmus test of their Leadership would be whether or not the Change UK lot, about whom everyone else had forgotten, had "felt able" to re-join the party, presumably less than a year after they had stood against it at the 2019 General Election. And then, what? Is Chris Leslie to return as Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, advocating permanent austerity as a matter of principle, even in the midst of the Plague?

Then again, who cares? There are those who bemoan that we have no party. But who needs one? It would only get in the way. Instead of controlling either party, we decide which of them gets to win. That gives us far more power, and we must be entirely unapologetic about using it.

Either Labour or the Conservatives must do and offer more to uphold family and community values by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty.

And either Labour or the Conservatives must do and offer more to the rural working class, and to the industrial and former industrial communities that were either outside the metropolitan areas or peripheral to them, those being the people and places whose votes now determined the outcomes of General Elections and of national referendums.

It is obvious which party is currently passing those tests, both nationally and here at North West Durham. In the absence of a candidate even closer to my views, and such a candidacy is still a possibility, then this veteran of the Postliberal Left will be voting for Richard Holden in 2024.

Nothing Vague About Plague

There are theological answers to this, but they are in the books that have been kept locked up in the cupboard at the back of the library for 50 or even 80 years. We are going to have to take a look in them again. Fasten your seatbelts.

Eternally GloriRana

After all these years, Manveen Rana is still "fantastic". Well, of course she is. And she always will be. She's Manveen. All hail!

Going Viral

I do not have the right symptoms for Covid-19, but the ones that I have are bad enough. I had thought that I had made it through this winter without a coronavirus infection, an extremely rare achievement on my part, but my most virulent in many a long year has turned up in the middle of March. If I were to be exposed to Covid-19, then I would certainly contract it. So several books are on order. As if I did not already have enough. Of course, one can never have enough books.

If the General Election had not ended the economic era that began with the Budget of December 1976, then Covid-19 has most certainly done so. Even the Universal Basic Income is well on the way to being mainstream by the middle of this year. Renationalisation, which had already begun with Northern Rail, will also soon be common sense to everyone who participated in the formation of such.

The withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union, including the Single Market and the Customs Union, already provided a double opportunity, both to reorganise the British economy under State direction, and to begin to develop a fully independent British foreign policy, including in relation to the United States. The Conservative Party was already moving in those directions. We are entering a new pro-business age.

The pro-business tradition came down to the Attlee Government from the ultraconservative figures of Colbert and Bismarck, via the Liberals Keynes and Beveridge, and it held sway in Britain until the Callaghan Government's turn to monetarism. That tradition corresponds closely but critically to the Hamiltonian American School as expanded by the American System of Henry Clay, a pro-business tradition that between the 1860s and the 1970s worked to make the United States the world's largest economy, with the world's highest standard of living, culminating in the glorious achievements of the New Deal, which in turn made possible the rise and triumph of the Civil Rights movement.

That was achieved, by Democrats and Republicans alike, through the strict division between investment banking and retail banking, with large amounts of federal credit (in Britain, that would be central government credit), at low interest rates and over a long term, to build great national projects, notably enormous expansions in infrastructure, which then paid for themselves many times over. There were pro-business tariffs and subsidies, and there was a pro-business National Bank to promote the growth of productive enterprises rather than speculation.

And here we are. Good will come out of this. It is already beginning to do so. But alas, this year's Durham Miners' Gala will probably not be held, depriving us of the opportunity to be dazzled by Keir Starmer. Tony Blair famously never used to turn up to it, even though his constituency began less than a mile from the venue. But that was hardly his worst offence, real though it was. Blair gave a Labour peerage to one of County Durham's worst war criminals against the miners.

And it is under this Conservative Government, supported by three of the six MPs for today's County Durham and by several more within the historic county boundaries, that the fabulous Miners' Hall at Redhills has been saved, while coal mining has returned, both in general, and to County Durham in particular. There was none of that under Blair.

Boris Johnson ought to use what would have been this year's Big Meeting Day, Saturday 11th July, to announce both the resolution of Mineworkers' Pension Scheme dispute in the miners' favour, and the resolution of the County Durham Teaching Assistants' dispute on the terms required by the County Durham Teaching Assistants Activists' Committee.

The cancellation of this year's Gala will spare Starmer from having to explain enormous local election losses, and it looks as if those elections themselves are going to be put back a year. In that case, they will be held on the same day as next year's English county council elections, at which, among other things, Labour is going to lose Overall Control of Durham County Council. Plus all the losses that would have happened this year. Let's hear Starmer explain that night a few weeks later.

A year, however, is long enough, even under the present circumstances, to enact legislation to hold all English local elections on the same day, beginning on Thursday 6th May 2021, with each of us voting for one candidate, and with the requisite number of Councillors for that Ward elected at the end. There would be a few Conservative losses as a result of this, but by far the biggest loser would be the Labour Party, and these days that means that by far the biggest winner would be the Conservative Party, together with their Independent allies or at least cooperators in areas such as this one.

A certain sort of Blairy Boy used to rant on that the Independents were "Tories", as if the inhabitants of the old steel towns and pit villages that elected them had somehow been unaware of that fact where it was the case. The seeds of recent developments were planted a long time ago. Richard Holden is building very much the sort of bridges to the Independent Councillors, Tory and most emphatically not, that I proposed during my parliamentary candidacy. I am delighted that that is the case.

Richard ought to make, as I would have done, the same offer to the Liberal Democrat Councillors. And he ought also to make the same offer to the Labour Councillors, if only to have it on the record that they had knocked him back. (By the way, I have no idea for whom I shall be voting next year. But I shall almost certainly not be standing.)

In addition to this change to the manner of local elections, Johnson ought to emulate Disraeli's brilliant doubling of the electorate, the effects of which can still be felt and always will be. He should legislate so that parliamentary candidates would have to be British citizens in Great Britain, or British or Irish citizens in Northern Ireland, but there would be no nationality requirement for voting, or indeed for standing in local elections.

Why would people not vote for the party that had given them the vote, rather than for the party that had never done so? That worked for Disraeli, and it could work for Johnson. In 19 per cent Other White, 4.9 per cent Black African, four per cent Other Asian, 2.9 per cent Chinese, 2.3 per cent Other, 1.7 per cent Other Black, and 1.6 per cent Arab Camden, then Starmer's own seat of Holborn and St Pancras could fall. The ageing Afro-Caribbean and South Asian grandees who back him are irrelevant to the BAME Britain of the 2020s.

Countries join and leave the Commonwealth quite frequently. The present system enfranchises Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, but not Americans or Israelis. Is that what those who write above the line in the Daily Telegraph want? It says that Ghanaians are more "like us" than Germans are, and that Swazis are more "like us" than Swedes are. Is that what those who write below the line in the Daily Mail want?

And speaking of Disraeli, I was correct yesterday when I said that the Conservative Party had never adopted the IHRA Definition of Antisemitism. Jeremy Corbyn is now going, and being 70 he will soon have to go into self-isolation, while the Government has adopted his economic programme. So expect to hear no more about this issue.

And if the Government did greatly increase the Conservative electorate as I suggested, then Labour's adoption of the IHRA's hierarchy of race, with the top spot given to the white adherents of a religion to which anyone may convert, would be just another point in Labour's disfavour with the people whom it had never enfranchised.

Now, some very strong medication beckons.

Not Blogging, Not Standing, Still Standing

I have been prone to coronavirus infections all my life, and my immune system was weakened by an otherwise lifesaving operation in 2008. I currently have the heaviest such infection that I have had in many a long year.

If I do not have Covid-19, then I would certainly contract it if I went out, which I therefore have no intention of doing for at least another week. Between the infection and the medication, I am in no mood to compose blog posts.

My hard-drinking, drug-taking, sexually promiscuous contemporaries flourish like the bay tree, as do their children and even their grandchildren. But my health is ruined. Oliver Kamm’s 20-year campaign to destroy it, deliberately and systematically, has succeeded. That he still feels it necessary to libel me on Twitter says all that needs to be said about him. 

A lot can pass up and down the Strand in four and a half years, and a lot might. But physically, if the campaign to be elected to Parliament in December 2024 did not kill me, then the duties of a Member of Parliament would. Yet the fight goes on.

The fight of those who, having suffered the most under all three parties in the era that began with the Budget of December 1976 and which has ended with the Budget of March 2020, made Jeremy Corbyn the Leader of the Labour Party, decided the EU referendum for Leave, reelected Corbyn, deprived Theresa May of her overall majority, delivered the scale of the Brexit Party’s victory at the 2019 European Elections, and gave an overall majority to Boris Johnson because Corbyn had abandoned his 2017 commitment to Brexit.

The fight to uphold family and community values by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty. The fight of the working class as the leaders of the struggle for economic equality. The fight of the working class and of the youth as the leaders of the struggle for international peace.

The fight of the rural working class, and of the industrial and former industrial communities that are either outside the metropolitan areas or peripheral to them, those being the people and places whose votes now determine the outcome of General Elections and of national referendums. The fight of those who cherish free speech and other civil liberties, including due process of law.

The fight for a fully independent British foreign policy, with a critical and sceptical approach to intelligence and security agencies, and with military force used only ever in self-defence. The fight of those who agree with the Conservative Party, as such, that the definition of anti-Semitism in the Oxford English Dictionary is perfectly sufficient: “Hostility to or prejudice against Jews.”

The fight of those who do not feel represented by the usual Jewish, Afro-Caribbean or South Asian “community leaders” embedded in the right-wing Labour Establishment. The fight of those of mixed heritage, and of those whose migrant backgrounds lie beyond the Caribbean and South Asia. The fight of those who acknowledge the scientific fact of binary and immutable biological sex.

And the fight of those who celebrate the full compatibility between the highest view of human demographic, economic, intellectual and cultural expansion and development, and the most active concern for the conservation of the natural world and of the treasures bequeathed by such expansion and development in the past.

It would be difficult to imagine a more perfect summary of everything to which Keir Starmer was opposed. In the name of neoliberal economic policy, identitarian social policy, neoconservative foreign policy, and anti-industrial Malthusianism, that opaquely funded member of the Trilateral Commission will be the voice of petty bourgeois whingeing against investment along the old Red Wall.

Starmer will demand British participation in any and every war for which Saudi Arabia had paid the Democratic National Committee to cheerlead. He wants to re-join the European Union, which would have to be on every term that the EU cared to set: Schengen, the euro, the lot. There would be no referendum.

As the Director of Public Prosecutions, Starmer began the persecution of Julian Assange, he refused to bring charges in relation to the death of Jean Charles de Menezes, and he imported Joe Biden’s mass incarceration of black men as a means of social control and as a source of cheap labour. Although Starmer carefully cultivates the impression that he has the personality of an overcooked mushroom, he is in fact the nastiest frontline politician to appear in this country in 80 years.

Starmer’s BAME supporters recall the Coloured and Indian politicians who agreed to sit in the tricameral Parliament of apartheid South Africa, and they are drawn from the ageing Afro-Caribbean and South Asian Establishment that is integral to the right-wing Labour machine in certain urban areas. They are a most unlovely bunch of coconuts, but they are mercifully irrelevant in 2020. BAME Britain, including BAME London, will no more vote to make Starmer Prime Minister than Wales, the Midlands or the North will. The Red Wall has not yet fully fallen, and the Black Wall will fall with it.

Any Labour candidate at North West Durham in 2024 will at least be pretending to believe that Starmer ought to become Prime Minister, and will probably really believe it. I know who I want as a candidate here, since, no matter what, I am already medically unfit for the task. I half-joke that he is my dauphin or delfino, but he is most emphatically his own man. He would make an excellent MP. And if he did not want it, or for whatever reason was unable to give it a go, what then?

What then for those who welcomed the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union as providing a double opportunity, both to reorganise the British economy under State direction, and to begin to develop a fully independent British foreign policy, including in relation to the United States? What then for those who welcomed the Conservative Party’s moves in those directions?

What then for those who were more than happy to bypass the Liberal Establishment and the right-wing Labour machine so as to work with Conservatives and others in order to secure direct representation on public bodies, in the media, and elsewhere?

Richard Holden, of course. In that case, vote for Richard Holden.

Now, I really must go back to bed. I may be some time.

Far Away In Afghanistan

Peter Hitchens writes:

Normally, I might be a bit cool about a movie such as Military Wives, which dramatises the foundation and success of a choir of women worrying at home, as their soldier husbands face danger far away in Afghanistan.

It barely brushes against the other problem – that it was very hard to work out what those soldiers were risking their lives for.

But the film moved me because it reminded me very strongly of that stupid, utterly pointless war whose victims often returned home in their flag-wrapped coffins, along a road not far from where I live.

I went, whenever possible, to stand with my head bowed as they went past, while silently cursing the governments that had sent them there.

I notice that a group of senior officers and MPs have recently written to The Times daftly attacking the new peace deal in Afghanistan – which might at last get Western troops out of a place they should never have entered.  

In some way, apparently, the deal will tarnish the memories of the British dead. Idiotically, they wrote:

‘These hasty negotiations may compromise the Afghan people and the gains that they have made in the past 19 years. They do not want to surrender women’s rights, freedom of speech and their democratic institutions.’ 

Well, do you know what? I don’t care. If anyone really wants to impose third-wave feminism on Afghanistan, let them get up an international brigade of volunteers and see how they get on. 

Our soldiers, who joined to serve Queen and Country, went because they were ordered to.

The real problem with the planned deal is that it exposes the stupidity and vanity of the politicians who sent troops to Afghanistan, and never should have done.

And:

I learned last week that a large group of military widows have been caught in a stupid legal trap. Because they have remarried, they have lost pensions, under former strict rules.

These rules were abolished in 2014 for those bereaved in later years, but the change does not apply to 300 women, widowed by long-ago conflicts such as the Falklands.

According to Julian Lewis MP, these 300 can get the money they are entitled to only if they divorce, and then marry again. 

This is obviously absurd. Can Mr Johnson please put it right?

Throw Some Light

Kenan Malik writes:

On 21 December 1988, Pan Am Flight 103 from Frankfurt to Detroit exploded over the Scottish town of Lockerbie. All 259 passengers and crew, and 11 Lockerbie residents were killed.

Thirteen years later, a Libyan, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, was found guilty of the bombing, and sentenced to life imprisonment.

For reasons of international diplomacy, the trial was held not before a Scottish jury but before three Scottish judges in a special court in the Netherlands.

Last week, the Scottish criminal cases review commission (SCCRC) referred the case to the appeal court because it “believes that a miscarriage of justice may have occurred”.

It’s the second time that the SCCRC has referred the case to the appeal court. In 2009, before the previous appeal could be completed, the Scottish government released Megrahi on “compassionate grounds” (he was suffering from prostate cancer).

He returned to Libya, where he died in 2012.

The case against Megrahi was circumstantial and dubious. Jim Swire, whose daughter Flora was killed on Flight 103, has devoted his life to unearthing the truth about the bombing, and has long campaigned to prove Megrahi’s innocence.

So has Robert Black, one of Scotland’s leading jurists, and the man who came up with the idea of a special trial in the Netherlands.

Many, including apparently the CIA, have suggested that the evidence pointed to Iranian, not Libyan involvement, possibly through a radical Palestinian cell.

Given the horror of the bombing, most people have been happy that someone was convicted, and not worried about the details.

But, as Swire and Black bravely attest, truth and justice matter, even, perhaps especially, in a case as terrible as Lockerbie. 

The appeal may finally throw some light on both.

Yet A Rubicon Has Been Crossed

Although he will never understand Brexit, Will Hutton writes:

Britain’s national debt over the past decade has always been a non-problem. For most of the last 300 years, it has been very much higher as a share of national output.

Our public debt has been well-managed by the Bank of England, so that the average duration of government bonds is 15 years: there is close to zero chance of a crisis of refinancing or of confidence in public debt. At current rates of interest the overall cost of debt service is among the lowest in our history.

Britain has thus plenty of room to spend and borrow, and there was no need for the draconian Cameron-Osborne austerity squeeze in which cumulative cuts in public spending in many areas of government exceeded 40%. Deficit reduction could have been more measured and the pain mitigated. 

It was baloney from top to bottom – a cruel hoax that was one of the reasons for the Brexit vote, imposing wanton and needless suffering. I and other Keynesian economists have made these arguments in vain for more than a decade – indeed for most of my working life. So Wednesday’s budget was an extraordinary moment.

Chancellor Rishi Sunak repudiated the entire discourse and accepted core Keynesian propositions. He delivered the biggest fiscal boost for nearly 30 years, coordinating it with an interest-rate reduction by the Bank of England – exactly the Keynesian stimulus a flagging economy needed.

Public investment was on target to become the highest since 1955, he declared – actually understating the coming public investment boom because in 1955 the comparable figures included investment by the nationalised industries, now nonexistent.

The coming wave of investment in roads, rail, housing, schools, further education and ports is unparalleled. It was not just that the investment is needed: he accepted it was part of the government’s role in raising parlously low levels of productivity. Right again.

Alongside it current public spending is going to rise again, with an additional £12bn package to alleviate the impact of Covid-19. The government would do everything it could to alleviate the spread and impact of the virus.

The larger point was that fiscal policy – excusing his party’s volte-face by trying to position it as part of the new international consensus – has got to shoulder its responsibility for driving the economy forward. Amen to that.

On the Today programme the following morning my jaw dropped as Sunak informed his audience that reasons for confidence in his package included Britain’s public debt averaging 15 years in duration and debt service costs being extraordinarily low.

To make the same argument during the Blair, Cameron and May years was to ensure you wore the mark of Cain – an outlandish Keynesian perspective that branded you as ignorant of the basic laws of economics and public finance. 

But if a Tory chancellor backed by his press makes the same argument, suddenly it becomes the new economic common sense. To be on the liberal left, as Neil Kinnock once remarked, is to be made to feel an alien outsider – even if reason and a majority of the electorate are with you.

Of course cruel truths remain. The colossal errors of the past decade, Brexit and austerity especially, cannot be expunged at a stroke. Britain’s long-run growth rate is barely above 1% as the Office for Budget Responsibility recorded. The impact of Brexit, it declared, would be to lower output over the next 15 years by 5.2% below what it would have been. 

The much-vaunted US trade deal, if it ever happens, will raise output by a mere 0.16%. Over the next decade exports and imports will be 15% lower. Britain, tragically, is closing – and becoming more intolerant and anti-foreigner in the process. 

Nor can the social carnage of the past decade be quickly corrected. Sunak did little or nothing to address child poverty, the desperate plight of the court and criminal justice system or a host of other casualties.

This was government from the centre for the centre: local government remained a neglected Cinderella. The increase in current public spending will redress only about a quarter of the cumulative loss in health and education spending since 2010.

Yet a Rubicon has been crossed. Keynesianism has been restored to its proper place in British public life. 

The Conservatives have once again shown their breathtaking and shameless capacity for reinvention. If Labour wants to trump them, it will need to take Keynesianism even further – into the wholesale Keynesian recasting of the way the financial system intersects with the real economy.

In the meantime it’s a big moment. Perhaps in this respect – and this only – Labour did win an argument at the last election. At the very least a new and beneficial consensus has been born.