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.