Having materialised without trace on the day that Keir Starmer became Leader of the Labour Party, what is Nick Thomas-Symonds for? He would seem to be there as a shield for Starmer.
“You hate me,” Starmer is able to say to his party, to its voters, and to the voters whom it lost in 2019, “but the alternative to being led by an upper-middle-class London Fabian is being led by the other side of the Labour Right, and you know exactly what that would mean. Look, here it is. It’s unmistakable.”
Indeed, it is. Thomas-Symonds could not be anything else. But rumour has it that he has the mildly bookish pretensions that do occasionally manifest themselves among the thuggish enforcers of Labour’s municipal and trade union Right. Some of us remember when John Reid was held up in all seriousness as an intellectual, and not at all as the man who had come to break your teeth on behalf of “The Party”. Oh, no. Oh no, indeed.
Apparently, somewhere out in the ether, there is some kind of pamphlet by Thomas-Symonds on Aneurin Bevan. Like Boris Johnson’s “biography” of Winston Churchill, this is a most unsubtle attempt to invite comparison. But whereas Johnson’s fame meant that serious figures in the field did at least have to go to the trouble of deriding his book to the outer reaches of scorn, it is not known whether they even bothered to do that for the utterly obscure Thomas-Symonds.
Anyway, though, this thing exists, if for some unknown reason you could stir yourself to go looking for it. So let us set its author a little test. Did Bevan ever say, “The NHS will last as long as there’s folk with faith left to fight for it”? The world divides between those who insist that, since nothing exists until some luvvie says it or does it, that line originates in a 1997 television play by one Trevor Griffiths, and those who know that Griffiths got it from the old Bevanites in the Welsh coalfields during the Strike.
The miners were entirely matter-of-fact that they had heard Bevan say it on a number of occasions. That was why it appeared, as it still does appear, over his name and under his picture on numerous trade union banners and elsewhere. Those date from long before 1997, of all years. Therefore, “Nye never said that” is a shibboleth among those who were tellingly never told that you must never call him “Nye”. It is a vital dividing line between those who do, and those who do not, regard working-class culture, and therefore also working-class politics, as having any validity in its own right.
But what says Nick Thomas-Symonds? On his answer depends whether or not his majority of 3,742, less than the vote for a Brexit Party that will not exist in 2024, should make his removal from Parliament a major priority for those who could imagine no higher pleasure than the defeat of the thuggish enforcers of Labour’s municipal and trade union Right, and for those of us who could imagine no higher pleasure than to see Labour MPs of our own generation lose their seats.
The miners were entirely matter-of-fact that they had heard Bevan say it on a number of occasions. That was why it appeared, as it still does appear, over his name and under his picture on numerous trade union banners and elsewhere. Those date from long before 1997, of all years. Therefore, “Nye never said that” is a shibboleth among those who were tellingly never told that you must never call him “Nye”. It is a vital dividing line between those who do, and those who do not, regard working-class culture, and therefore also working-class politics, as having any validity in its own right.
But what says Nick Thomas-Symonds? On his answer depends whether or not his majority of 3,742, less than the vote for a Brexit Party that will not exist in 2024, should make his removal from Parliament a major priority for those who could imagine no higher pleasure than the defeat of the thuggish enforcers of Labour’s municipal and trade union Right, and for those of us who could imagine no higher pleasure than to see Labour MPs of our own generation lose their seats.
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