"They Might Not Vote At All"

As someone screamed at me 17 years ago on the subject of whether or not the working classes would vote for a Labour ticket with me on it. 

He himself came off the local public sector gentry, he was at the time employed by a Cabinet Minister, and he turned out to be unelectable to the point of contagion after he was put on the ballot paper without a selection meeting because I would have won it. So next year's catastrophic local election results for Labour will be my second time of being able to answer the Labour Right's jibe of "You're unelectable" with, "Well, so are you."

If Labour kept control of Durham County Council next year, then the election would have been rigged. There would simply be no other possible explanation. This is the most corrupt municipality in Western Europe, so there would be none of the shock that might accompany such a realisation anywhere else. Even mild surprise would be unlikely. People would just shrug their shoulders and ask to be told something that they did not already know.

The Labour Party in County Durham routinely engages in practices such as fielding decoy candidates to split the Opposition vote. I personally witnessed tampering with a ballot box at the count in 2017. I know for a fact that the boxes in Burnhope were stuffed against me, and possibly at least one in Lanchester as well. When I stood for Parliament, then getting the paperwork out of County Hall was like pulling teeth, and I was simply never sent a copy of the electoral register. But I grew up with this kind of thing.

Just as I am unshocked by jury tampering. I feel for the widow of PC Andrew Harper, but I have been there and done that. And not at the hands of illiterate teenagers. I have had a show trial that would have shamed North Korea, where at least they have the decency not to pretend. On the weight of the "evidence" that convicted me, then Oliver Kamm and the Prosecution's witness against my character would both now be preparing to serve very long prison sentences. But they are not.

All of that brings me back to the reprobate with whom I began. His deployment of the Angry Black Woman trope against Diane Abbott was a racist incident within the understanding of the Macpherson Report, which has now been canonised by the people who used to want to burn it, just as they have decided to revere the admittedly black-free Equality and Human Rights Commission, which they used to want to abolish.

Yet that racist former London Regional Director of the Labour Party remains politically protected to the point of immunity from arrest, even though the facts are not in dispute, and even though at least one complaint has certainly been made to the Police.