Biden Their Time

Gordon Brown used to go on holiday by borrowing one of John Kerry's houses. Perhaps he still does. If Kerry had won in 2004, then Brown would have been Prime Minister in time to have attended his Inauguration in that capacity. What else is the CIA for?

And no other world leader is as associated with Donald Trump as Boris Johnson is. So if Joe Biden did win this year, then the Prime Minister at his Inauguration would not be Johnson, but, since installing Keir Starmer in this Parliament would be a bit of a tall order, someone from the economically neoliberal and internationally neoconservative wing of the Conservative Party. What else is the CIA for?

By the way, forget about the idea that the dispossession, for the time being, of that wing of the Conservative Party has dispossessed its social liberals. This Government has just enacted no-fault divorce, it imposed abortion on Northern Ireland, it has only temporarily suspended its scheme to turn Sunday into just another shopping day (although that is the one that the Red Wall would wish to do the most to block), and at the stroke of a pen it has given the chance of fast-tracked British citizenship to anything up to three million Hongkongers. Its shifted position on gender self-identification is still more liberal than that of the Morning Star.

I have never known the Left as split as it is on gender self-identification. The differences over Brexit are as pronounced, but there is none of the acrimony. And on Hong Kong, people are assets, so that the extension of British citizenship to adults born after the handover, who are the great majority of the demonstrators, would be an imperialistic seizure of assets such as Britain would not have inflicted on China since the seizure of Hong Kong itself. China would and does see it in those terms, and within the framework of the East Asian concept of losing and saving face. British citizens' assets in China, and in the ever-expanding Chinese sphere of influence, would be seized on a very grand scale if we were to go through with this.

Anyway, to return to the main point of this post, if Biden won this year, then the Prime Minister at his Inauguration would not be Johnson, but someone from the economically neoliberal and internationally neoconservative wing of the Conservative Party. But while Trump is an abysmal President, the Budget of March 2020 has ended the era that began with the Budget of 1976. The Centre is the think tank for this new era. It already has plenty going on. And a second defeat by Trump would kill off the Democratic Party, enabling it to be replaced with something better. In spite of everything, we need to hope for Trump.