Drink To The New Year

Boris Johnson is obviously an alcoholic, and it is common knowledge that he is under the doctor for it. The same has been true of many successful politicians, as it still is. 

But if it were all to get too much to manage, then we could be looking at a very big year in 2021, especially after Labour's meltdown on Super Thursday, 6th May.

Someone who wanted to return to the thoroughly illogical combination of fiscal and military hawkishness would have to be defeated by Rishi Sunak.

And the fiscally and militarily hawkish Keir Starmer will also have to be defeated. There is only one man to do that. As should have happened this year, there needs to be a head to head between Starmer and Jeremy Corbyn.

Sing Along With The Common People?

The linen suit has gone away for another year, since tomorrow there will be an r in the month. And so ends the Silver Jubilee of the Golden Britpop Summer of 1995, halfway through my time in the Sixth Form. "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven!" In the words of Jarvis Cocker.

Generation is key to understanding those who cannot fathom why there is not a Starmer-led Labour Government, or at any rate why a Labour Party led by Keir Starmer is not the promised 20 points ahead. Most people never acquire any historical perspective, and many of my age group still think that a Labour Government is normal, or at least relatively common. It is not, and it never will be.

Partial To This

I am loving the sheer decadence of Britain at the moment. The position of Cabinet Secretary and Head of the Civil Service is about to be given to some Royal courtier mate of Boris Johnson's. The country is being run as if it were a Durham college, or a Catholic school. 

The cry is going up that this will compromise the "impartiality" of the Civil Service. The what? If you have found someone who thinks that either the Civil Service or the BBC has ever been "impartial", then you have found a member of the metropolitan liberal elite.

And whatever else such a person may be or think herself to be, she has never been either left-wing or a Tory.

Not Winning On Points

When Labour and the Conservatives were level in the polls last year, then the individuals who were doing cartwheels yesterday were insisting that Labour ought to have been 20 points ahead, and were demanding that its Leader resign.

Almost immediately after the 2017 General Election, when the party had taken the 40 per cent that it recorded yesterday but had still lost, then Labour acquired a poll lead that remained consistent until the adoption of Keir Starmer's second referendum. 

That lead was sometimes the eight points that has been at the lower end of the Conservative lead throughout the Starmer months until, supposedly, last week. Beginning with a Conservative overall majority of 80, then 40 per cent for each of the main parties would still translate into a comfortable Conservative victory.

It was not a joke when Starmer promised to put Labour 20 points ahead. When is that going to happen? Or when is Labour going to get rid of Starmer? The Leadership Election that there needs to be, and which there ought to have been this year, is a straight fight between him and Jeremy Corbyn.

We Never Had?

Congratulations to Matt Chorley and Times Radio on having lost their own Twitter poll. 

Charles Kennedy and Jeremy Corbyn were both prominent opponents of the Iraq War. That remains the defining event of British politics, nearly 20 years later. 

And The Times was well and truly on the wrong side of it, even according to the listeners to its own radio station. 

My, but Corbyn still has the powers that be spooked. 

Only Piers Corbyn was arrested and fined £10,000 over Saturday's anti-lockdown rally of tens of thousands of people. Just as an excuse to say the words "brother of Jeremy Corbyn" on the news.

Jeremy Corbyn himself now says almost nothing. He has no need to say very much. Merely by existing, he frightens the life out of them.

Oliver Kamm Candidacy Watch: Day 17

Oliver Kamm, since you are a Starmer supporter, if you were to be the Labour candidate here at North West Durham next time (and they still cannot find one for this highly marginal seat), then I would put up as an Independent again.

You could have the Labour nomination here with one tweet: "In support of @Keir_Starmer, I am the @UKLabour candidate at North West Durham, there being no other. @NWDurhamLabour @CoDurhamLabour @RicHolden @TheNorthernEcho @itvtynetees @BBCLN" 

Get it tweeted. Go on. I dare you. Put up or shut up. A daily update will appear here until you do.

Oliver Kamm Arrest Watch: Day 25

There is more evidence to arrest Oliver Kamm than there was to convict me, and he clams up over on Guido Fawkes when asked whether or not he has been arrested. So, has Oliver Kamm been arrested? If not, why not?

Kamm faked a death threat against himself, and he used a contact at Durham, who ought also to be arrested and who may in fact have been so, to try and pin it on me. That incident is so similar to the one of which I was convicted as to call into question my conviction. A daily update will appear here until further notice.

Oliver Kamm Libel Watch: Day 56

Oliver Kamm, you are a liar, and as such you are unfit to hold your position on The Times.

Sue me.

Your bizarre CapX article, as well as numerous other statements of yours since then, have had nothing to do with the substance of my previous court case, in relation to which I maintain my innocence. So they have not already been tested in court. And they are lies.

You made up the "anti-Semitic death threat" against yourself, in a language that I could not read, and even though you are not Jewish. I was present when the Police literally laughed it out.

Like me, the Police know how you did it; they know who in Durham you used, and so do I. Eventually, you will either do time for this, or it will see you sent to a psychiatric institution, possibly both.

You are a stalker with an acknowledged history of mental illness, and I can see less and less reason why I ought not to move to have you committed. Or sent to prison. By the criteria that were used to convict me, then that would be an open and shut case.

Next time that you try and frame someone, then do not use a language, and even a script, that your target cannot read. The Police tend to laugh out that kind of thing.

Oliver Kamm, you are a liar, and as such you are unfit to hold your position on The Times. Sue me. This post will appear here daily until you do.

Far From Fine

I could not have disagreed more with yesterday's demonstration in Trafalgar Square. But no one from Black Lives Matter or from Extinction Rebellion has been fined £10,000 for breach of the lockdown. No one from Black Lives Matter or from Extinction Rebellion has been fined one penny piece. 

Then again, no one from Black Lives Matter or from Extinction Rebellion has had the same surname as The Man They Still Can't Stop Talking About after he gave them the fright of their sweet little lives in 2017 before still managing to take 10 million votes from the disobedient electorate even last year. He himself says almost nothing. But they go on, and on, and on about him. To the extent of singling out his relatives like this. 

This very day, via the back channel of the Sunday Times, Rishi Sunak announces the adoption of Jeremy Corbyn's policies both on corporation tax and on capital gains tax. Well, the Red Wall has to be held somehow. And this very day, Piers Corbyn is arrested, and fined £10,000, just as an excuse to mention his brother on the news. The younger Corbyn is living rent free in the heads of the British Establishment.

Pomp and Circumstance

The people who have been banging on about the Last Night of the Proms, when, if ever, did they last see it? 

Not only in the last few years, but for at least 25 years to my certain knowledge, the thing has been a sea of EU flags and the flags of assorted EU member states.

Those have always been the people who could afford the tickets.

Level Pegging

I could not disagree more with Piers Corbyn about Covid-19. But they only ever arrest him. They are still that spooked by the General Election of 2017.

At that Election, Jeremy Corbyn would have become Prime Minister if it had not been for the machinations of Labour Party staffers who were acting certainly in the interests, and no doubt with the connivance, of Keir Starmer. One trusts that Starmer will enjoy being a former Director of Public Prosecutions when he is in prison for fraud. #LockHimUp

Even if you truly believe that a 10-point lead has disappeared during the famously eventful last week in August, then so what? The Conservatives have an overall majority of 80, so level pegging with Labour would still translate into a Conservative victory.

On a day when it is reported that the Government intends to implement yet more of last year's Labour manifesto, this story has of course been confected in order to justify a challenge to Boris Johnson's Leadership in the name of fiscal and military hawkishness, a position that is internally incoherent, but there we are. Expect the pressure for this challenge to intensify if the fiscally and militarily hawkish Joe Biden were to beat Donald Trump.

How else, Conservative MPs would ask, could Starmer be defeated, except by capturing and holding his neoliberal and neoconservative ground? But in that case, then why not just support Starmer for Prime Minister? Conservative MPs who joined the Labour Party have never been expected to recant any past opinion or action. Alan Howarth was made a Minister by Tony Blair while continuing to defend both the pit closures programme and the Poll Tax.

And this once, "My party has left me" might do. Electoral dependence on the Red Wall, and not Covid-19, is why the Conservative Party has adopted its present position under Johnson and under Rishi Sunak. Starmer despises the Red Wall, he is delighted to see the back of it, and, with his second referendum, he was in fact more responsible than any other individual for Labour's loss of it.

Like most Labour MPs, many and perhaps most Conservative MPs hold to a position according to which there must be no deviation from an economic and social liberalism that the use of soft power where possible but hard power where necessary had made unquestionable at home, so that the use of soft power where possible but very hard power where necessary could spread it across the whole wide earth by means of an unquestionable alliance between the European Union and the United States, an alliance with Britain at both its cultural and its military heart.

The defeat of Jeremy Corbyn had been assumed to have made that position unassailable. Once again, there was simply to be no debate about either economic policy or foreign policy. But for that purpose, Corbyn lost the wrong seats. Meaning that Johnson won the wrong seats. Right now, he is fighting to free Britain from the State Aid rules of Margaret Thatcher's European Single Market, effectively announcing his view that Tony Benn had been right along. But if you do not believe that Tony Benn had been right all along, then you can still vote for the legacy of Margaret Thatcher. By voting for Keir Starmer.

Oliver Kamm Candidacy Watch: Day 16

Oliver Kamm, since you are a Starmer supporter, if you were to be the Labour candidate here at North West Durham next time (and they still cannot find one for this highly marginal seat), then I would put up as an Independent again.

You could have the Labour nomination here with one tweet: "In support of @Keir_Starmer, I am the @UKLabour candidate at North West Durham, there being no other. @NWDurhamLabour @CoDurhamLabour @RicHolden @TheNorthernEcho @itvtynetees @BBCLN" 

Get it tweeted. Go on. I dare you. Put up or shut up. A daily update will appear here until you do.

Oliver Kamm Arrest Watch: Day 24

There is more evidence to arrest Oliver Kamm than there was to convict me, and he clams up over on Guido Fawkes when asked whether or not he has been arrested. So, has Oliver Kamm been arrested? If not, why not?

Kamm faked a death threat against himself, and he used a contact at Durham, who ought also to be arrested and who may in fact have been so, to try and pin it on me. That incident is so similar to the one of which I was convicted as to call into question my conviction. A daily update will appear here until further notice.

Oliver Kamm Libel Watch: Day 55

Oliver Kamm, you are a liar, and as such you are unfit to hold your position on The Times.

Sue me.

Your bizarre CapX article, as well as numerous other statements of yours since then, have had nothing to do with the substance of my previous court case, in relation to which I maintain my innocence. So they have not already been tested in court. And they are lies.

You made up the "anti-Semitic death threat" against yourself, in a language that I could not read, and even though you are not Jewish. I was present when the Police literally laughed it out.

Like me, the Police know how you did it; they know who in Durham you used, and so do I. Eventually, you will either do time for this, or it will see you sent to a psychiatric institution, possibly both.

You are a stalker with an acknowledged history of mental illness, and I can see less and less reason why I ought not to move to have you committed. Or sent to prison. By the criteria that were used to convict me, then that would be an open and shut case.

Next time that you try and frame someone, then do not use a language, and even a script, that your target cannot read. The Police tend to laugh out that kind of thing.

Oliver Kamm, you are a liar, and as such you are unfit to hold your position on The Times. Sue me. This post will appear here daily until you do.

Stay Alert, Indeed

The black, white and red flag on the streets of Berlin. The flash and circle of Mosley's Union Banner in Trafalgar Square. The white, red and white flag on the streets of Minsk. 

These are dark days, brothers and sisters. Dark, dark days.

Life, Style

The Republican Party is still turning on the social conservatism, and especially the opposition to abortion, in order to get the vote out for Donald Trump. It used to say all of that under the old Republicans who spoke at this year's Democratic National Convention.

But it never delivered any of it, and none of those speakers for Joe Biden has changed opinion on anything. They all just see Biden as the natural successor to Bob Dole, John McCain and the Bushes. And so he is. Dole, McCain and the Bushes said everything that Trump is saying now, at least on those issues. 

As for Trump, he has delivered Supreme Court Justices who were confirmed only because they had assured Republican Senators that they would leave abortion and same-sex marriage exactly as they were, and so far they have been as good as their word.

Trump would not pursue the belligerent Bush-McCain foreign policy of Biden, so there is a pro-life argument for him there. On abortion, however, there is none. Just as there has never been any for the Republican Party in general. Nor for the Democratic Party, but it has never pretended otherwise.

Culture Wars Without Culture

If the giant lizards are so powerful, then how come they can't do anything about David Icke? 

As for the claim that no healthy child has died of Covid-19 in Britain, no healthy person of any age has ever died of any disease anywhere.

And neither Black Lives Matter nor anyone else ever called for any change to the Last Night of the Proms. When did Boris Johnson last watch that, anyway? Has he ever?

Oliver Kamm Candidacy Watch: Day 15

Oliver Kamm, since you are a Starmer supporter, if you were to be the Labour candidate here at North West Durham next time (and they still cannot find one for this highly marginal seat), then I would put up as an Independent again.

You could have the Labour nomination here with one tweet: "In support of @Keir_Starmer, I am the @UKLabour candidate at North West Durham, there being no other. @NWDurhamLabour @CoDurhamLabour @RicHolden @TheNorthernEcho @itvtynetees @BBCLN" 

Get it tweeted. Go on. I dare you. Put up or shut up. A daily update will appear here until you do.

Oliver Kamm Arrest Watch: Day 23

There is more evidence to arrest Oliver Kamm than there was to convict me, and he clams up over on Guido Fawkes when asked whether or not he has been arrested. So, has Oliver Kamm been arrested? If not, why not?

Kamm faked a death threat against himself, and he used a contact at Durham, who ought also to be arrested and who may in fact have been so, to try and pin it on me. That incident is so similar to the one of which I was convicted as to call into question my conviction. A daily update will appear here until further notice.

Oliver Kamm Libel Watch: Day 54

Oliver Kamm, you are a liar, and as such you are unfit to hold your position on The Times.

Sue me.

Your bizarre CapX article, as well as numerous other statements of yours since then, have had nothing to do with the substance of my previous court case, in relation to which I maintain my innocence. So they have not already been tested in court. And they are lies.

You made up the "anti-Semitic death threat" against yourself, in a language that I could not read, and even though you are not Jewish. I was present when the Police literally laughed it out.

Like me, the Police know how you did it; they know who in Durham you used, and so do I. Eventually, you will either do time for this, or it will see you sent to a psychiatric institution, possibly both.

You are a stalker with an acknowledged history of mental illness, and I can see less and less reason why I ought not to move to have you committed. Or sent to prison. By the criteria that were used to convict me, then that would be an open and shut case.

Next time that you try and frame someone, then do not use a language, and even a script, that your target cannot read. The Police tend to laugh out that kind of thing.

Oliver Kamm, you are a liar, and as such you are unfit to hold your position on The Times. Sue me. This post will appear here daily until you do.

Stand With Rand

The buffoons who attacked Rand Paul, no doubt oblivious to who he was, will presumably be voting for Joe Biden. 

But Paul's speech to the Republican National Convention made it clear that Donald Trump was significantly less belligerent towards both the internal colonies, and the actual or potential external colonies, than Biden and Kamala Harris had been over several decades.

And the Republican National Convention also featured far more black speakers than the Democratic National Convention had. Far fewer elderly Republicans. But far more black people. With no canonisation of great monsters of the age such as the Bushes and John McCain.

Work Ethic?

The furore over Richard Littlejohn has shed light on an important fact. 

Not all of those "libertarian" and "contrarian" columnists are doing it from Florida, but for decades they have all worked from home.

Yet the lockdown has caused them all to have somewhere that they desperately needed to be.

And now they want to order everyone else "back to work".

Dark Ages

The BBC calls the gun-toting 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse a "man".

It must think that he is black.

Better Luck Next Time?

It is more than possible that every Labour member of Durham County Council in North West Durham voted for me last year. The reasons ranged from being practically family to me, to hating my guts but hating Laura Pidcock's even more. I can think of no more than two possible exceptions, and of only one on whose vote for Pidcock anyone would put any money.

Having been liberated, voluntarily or otherwise, next May, several of them will sign my nomination papers in 2024, 30 years after more than one of them had first told me that I would be the MP here "eventually". Several of them offered to sign my nomination papers in 2019, but they were persuaded that then was not the time to be expelled from the Labour Party. Like a lot of other people, they have been introducing me at funerals as "our next MP", and then as "the man who should have been our MP", for about 15 years, or possibly slightly longer. They will resume doing so when political funerals of the old school resumed. 

Someone who had been elected as a County Councillor for the first time days before, and who used to be a Parish Councillor with me, did sign Pidcock's nomination papers in 2017. But even he did not bother two years later, when they were signed by no one who had ever been elected above Parish level, if at all. Whereas my proposer was a former Deputy Leader of Durham County Council. I am going to go out on a limb here and say that the Labour County Councillors all voted for me. Certainly, none of them turned up to the count. Not one. 

After a four-year campaign, will I manage a saved deposit, and more votes than the margin of victory? Certainly. Third place? Probably. Second? Why not? First? Never say never.

Oliver Kamm Candidacy Watch: Day 14

Oliver Kamm, since you are a Starmer supporter, if you were to be the Labour candidate here at North West Durham next time (and they still cannot find one for this highly marginal seat), then I would put up as an Independent again.

You could have the Labour nomination here with one tweet: "In support of @Keir_Starmer, I am the @UKLabour candidate at North West Durham, there being no other. @NWDurhamLabour @CoDurhamLabour @RicHolden @TheNorthernEcho @itvtynetees @BBCLN" 

Get it tweeted. Go on. I dare you. Put up or shut up. A daily update will appear here until you do.

Oliver Kamm Arrest Watch: Day 22

There is more evidence to arrest Oliver Kamm than there was to convict me, and he clams up over on Guido Fawkes when asked whether or not he has been arrested. So, has Oliver Kamm been arrested? If not, why not?

Kamm faked a death threat against himself, and he used a contact at Durham, who ought also to be arrested and who may in fact have been so, to try and pin it on me. That incident is so similar to the one of which I was convicted as to call into question my conviction. A daily update will appear here until further notice.

Oliver Kamm Libel Watch: Day 53

Oliver Kamm, you are a liar, and as such you are unfit to hold your position on The Times.

Sue me.

Your bizarre CapX article, as well as numerous other statements of yours since then, have had nothing to do with the substance of my previous court case, in relation to which I maintain my innocence. So they have not already been tested in court. And they are lies.

You made up the "anti-Semitic death threat" against yourself, in a language that I could not read, and even though you are not Jewish. I was present when the Police literally laughed it out.

Like me, the Police know how you did it; they know who in Durham you used, and so do I. Eventually, you will either do time for this, or it will see you sent to a psychiatric institution, possibly both.

You are a stalker with an acknowledged history of mental illness, and I can see less and less reason why I ought not to move to have you committed. Or sent to prison. By the criteria that were used to convict me, then that would be an open and shut case.

Next time that you try and frame someone, then do not use a language, and even a script, that your target cannot read. The Police tend to laugh out that kind of thing.

Oliver Kamm, you are a liar, and as such you are unfit to hold your position on The Times. Sue me. This post will appear here daily until you do.

Self-Identification

To the scorn of the local right-wing Labour machine that staked its reputation on an unsuccesful campaign, over three years and at vast expense, to put me in prison, Richard Holden supports infrastructure projects that depend on the harnessing of scientific fact.

But if a scientific fact as basic and as obvious as biological sex can be denied, then so can any other scientific fact, to the ruin of human progress. Richard's subscription to the theory of gender self-identification is a game changer.

Until further notice, consider me an Independent candidate for the parliamentary seat of North West Durham in 2024. Watch this space.

If the Labour Right or the Catholic Church, as if there were a  difference in the North, wished to continue its lawfare against me, then it would be doing so specifically against my parliamentary candidacy. Of course, that has always been the purpose of that lawfare. The Diocese of Hexham and Newcastle is a registered charity. For now.

Recognition

From replacing Shotley Bridge Hospital, to restoring the rail link between Consett and Tyneside, to cutting the tax on motorhomes, to abolishing business rates on public conveniences, to bringing a Gigafactory to County Durham, to securing justice for the victims of Medomsley Detention Centre, to fighting against gambling addiction, I strongly support the work of my MP, Richard Holden. 

Therefore, I am profoundly disappointed that he has put his name to this. Although its logic is entirely sound. If you subscribe to Thatcherism and neoliberalism, then you do have to support gender self-identification, since that was where the concept came from. It is a different question whether Richard really does subscribe to Thatcherism and neoliberalism, but here we are.

"Recent data indicated that fewer than 5000 people had obtained a Gender Recognition Certificate, which represents approximately 0.1 per cent of the estimated trans population in the UK"? So there are five million of them? One in 14 people? A population equal to that of Scotland or of the West Midlands ceremonial county? Do you believe that? No, neither do I.

This raises a very interesting question here at North West Durham. With her deep roots in the Old Left's strong material realism, Laura Pidcock was entirely sound on the matter, so to speak, of who was a woman and who was not. But will any such candidate contest North West Durham in 2024?

Down The Pan

Alas, it is not to be Layla Moran after all. Not only is she completely potty, but she has the decency to look it. 

Instead, though, Boris Johnson, who is many things but who is never dull, is to face two men each of whom could bore the bark off a tree.

They're All The Same

The Conservatives are in power in England. The SNP is in power in Scotland. Labour and the Liberal Democrats are in power in Wales. The DUP and Sinn Féin are in power in Northern Ireland. 

All four had the exam results fiasco. All four have the carry on over face masks in schools. And that's just Education.

Lib Without Dem?

Sir Ed Davey has been elected Leader of the Liberal Democrats with 42,756 votes. Layla Moran took 24,564, and turnout was 57 per cent. That suggests more Lib Dem members than one might have assumed. They are regrouping. 

As for the 43 per cent abstention rate, turnout in Leadership Elections is rarely very high. More than one in eight paid up Conservatives did not vote even when the election in question was directly going to choose the Prime Minister. Of candidates to lead any party in recent years, only Jeremy Corbyn has really been able to get the vote out. 

After all, there are purely social reasons to be in the Conservative Party. This side of Super Thursday, 6th May 2021, there are still essentially apolitical reasons to be in the Labour Party, such as wanting a job with the council, or wanting a better council house. 

And the Lib Dems? Why else is anyone in that? Who knows? But there is obviously some reason. Someone ought to look into it.

And Players

We have stumbled upon a class fissure.

It is between those who state openly that I have obviously been fitted up by the legendarily corrupt right-wing Labour machine in County Durham, and those, below the salt, who vulgarly pretend to believe that I am guilty. 

You can give anyone you like a DPhil, and make him Leader of a County Council. You give anyone you like a column on The Times. You can waft anyone you like from the staff of a Cabinet Minister, via the upper bureaucracy of a major political party, to that of the biggest bank in the world.

But none of that, in itself, makes him a gentleman. And he cares. Oh, but he cares.

Oliver Kamm Candidacy Watch: Day 13

Oliver Kamm, since you are a Starmer supporter, if you were to be the Labour candidate here at North West Durham next time (and they still cannot find one for this highly marginal seat), then I would put up as an Independent again.

You could have the Labour nomination here with one tweet: "In support of @Keir_Starmer, I am the @UKLabour candidate at North West Durham, there being no other. @NWDurhamLabour @CoDurhamLabour @RicHolden @TheNorthernEcho @itvtynetees @BBCLN" 

Get it tweeted. Go on. I dare you. Put up or shut up. A daily update will appear here until you do.

Oliver Kamm Arrest Watch: Day 21

There is more evidence to arrest Oliver Kamm than there was to convict me, and he clams up over on Guido Fawkes when asked whether or not he has been arrested. So, has Oliver Kamm been arrested? If not, why not?

Kamm faked a death threat against himself, and he used a contact at Durham, who ought also to be arrested and who may in fact have been so, to try and pin it on me. That incident is so similar to the one of which I was convicted as to call into question my conviction. A daily update will appear here until further notice.

Oliver Kamm Libel Watch: Day 52

Oliver Kamm, you are a liar, and as such you are unfit to hold your position on The Times.

Sue me.

Your bizarre CapX article, as well as numerous other statements of yours since then, have had nothing to do with the substance of my previous court case, in relation to which I maintain my innocence. So they have not already been tested in court. And they are lies.

You made up the "anti-Semitic death threat" against yourself, in a language that I could not read, and even though you are not Jewish. I was present when the Police literally laughed it out.

Like me, the Police know how you did it; they know who in Durham you used, and so do I. Eventually, you will either do time for this, or it will see you sent to a psychiatric institution, possibly both.

You are a stalker with an acknowledged history of mental illness, and I can see less and less reason why I ought not to move to have you committed. Or sent to prison. By the criteria that were used to convict me, then that would be an open and shut case.

Next time that you try and frame someone, then do not use a language, and even a script, that your target cannot read. The Police tend to laugh out that kind of thing.

Oliver Kamm, you are a liar, and as such you are unfit to hold your position on The Times. Sue me. This post will appear here daily until you do.

At The Klux

On yesterday's post about Lisa Nandy's review of UN institutions, this comment was posted: "Who's Nandy going to put on this review? Someone from HSBC, bankers to the Mexican and Colombian drug cartels?" If so, then someone does spring to mind. 

And on yesterday's post about Richard Spencer's endorsement of Joe Biden, this comment was posted: "Didn't the Ku Klux Klan once endorse someone against you?" A long time ago, yes.

Double Digit

YouGov has the Conservatives on 43 per cent, up three, and Labour on 36 per cent, down two. 

That would be bad enough for Labour. But the Brexit Party, which at least for all practical purposes no longer exists, is on three per cent. 

Add that, as we must, to the Conservative total, and Labour is 10 points behind. Or, in the terms that Keir Starmer promised, 30 points behind.

Brexit and the Real Centre Ground

Comment Central's lead item today, by me. 

It has also made Guido Fawkes's Seen Elsewhere sidebar.

Beyond The Great Wall

I am intrigued at the idea that Tony Abbott might be appointed to the Board of Trade. 

One third of all of Australia's exports go to China, and one in 50 people in Australia is ethnically Chinese.

It is inconceivable that Boris Johnson, Dominic Cummings and Munira Mirza do not know these things.

Get It Dunn

A virtual trial or a trial in abstentia would be better than nothing. But Anne Sacoolas did not have diplomatic immunity. 

Prince Andrew should go nowhere until Sacoolas had been extradited to Britain. He should present himself in the Southern District of New York when she presented herself in the southern district of Northamptonshire. And not a second earlier. 

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

Persian Excursion

If Lisa Nandy, Reviewer of the United Nations, wanted to make herself useful, then she would board a plane to Tehran with her smartphone in her hand. Immediately before landing, she would tweet that she would not be leaving without Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe.

The same goes for either candidate to lead the Liberal Democrats. Or, since she is clearly looking to get back in, for Laura Pidcock. If I had been elected last December, then this would have happened in 2019.

Now lift the sanctions against Iran. Or stop pretending to be any kind of enemy of Wahhabi terrorism.

Review This

I am sure that the United Nations Security Council is quaking at the prospect of being reviewed by Lisa Nandy. 

Honestly, these are the people whose outriders, convinced beyond argument that the lower orders are as uninterested in politics as they are, belch their contempt at those of us who dare to mention how the money supply works, or to question wars in which this country is actively engaged. "Ordinary people don't care about that," apparently.

Yet we commoners are expected to be moved by Nandy's thoughts on, "the structure of the Security Council, the role of the General Assembly, the powers of the World Health Organization, the UN’s efficiency, its links with civil society, and the ways in which UN bodies such as the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons and the International Court of Justice can better hold national governments to account for crimes against humanity." 

The gushing over this is coming from exactly the individuals who have in some cases spent 20 years spitting abuse at the rest of us for even so much as knowing what these things were. Now, however hilariously, they presume the right to "review" them.

Oliver Kamm Candidacy Watch: Day 12

Oliver Kamm, since you are a Starmer supporter, if you were to be the Labour candidate here at North West Durham next time (and they still cannot find one for this highly marginal seat), then I would put up as an Independent again.

You could have the Labour nomination here with one tweet: "In support of @Keir_Starmer, I am the @UKLabour candidate at North West Durham, there being no other. @NWDurhamLabour @CoDurhamLabour @RicHolden @TheNorthernEcho @itvtynetees @BBCLN" 

Get it tweeted. Go on. I dare you. Put up or shut up. A daily update will appear here until you do.

Oliver Kamm Arrest Watch: Day 20

There is more evidence to arrest Oliver Kamm than there was to convict me, and he clams up over on Guido Fawkes when asked whether or not he has been arrested. So, has Oliver Kamm been arrested? If not, why not?

Kamm faked a death threat against himself, and he used a contact at Durham, who ought also to be arrested and who may in fact have been so, to try and pin it on me. That incident is so similar to the one of which I was convicted as to call into question my conviction. A daily update will appear here until further notice.

Oliver Kamm Libel Watch: Day 51

Oliver Kamm, you are a liar, and as such you are unfit to hold your position on The Times.

Sue me.

Your bizarre CapX article, as well as numerous other statements of yours since then, have had nothing to do with the substance of my previous court case, in relation to which I maintain my innocence. So they have not already been tested in court. And they are lies.

You made up the "anti-Semitic death threat" against yourself, in a language that I could not read, and even though you are not Jewish. I was present when the Police literally laughed it out.

Like me, the Police know how you did it; they know who in Durham you used, and so do I. Eventually, you will either do time for this, or it will see you sent to a psychiatric institution, possibly both.

You are a stalker with an acknowledged history of mental illness, and I can see less and less reason why I ought not to move to have you committed. Or sent to prison. By the criteria that were used to convict me, then that would be an open and shut case.

Next time that you try and frame someone, then do not use a language, and even a script, that your target cannot read. The Police tend to laugh out that kind of thing.

Oliver Kamm, you are a liar, and as such you are unfit to hold your position on The Times. Sue me. This post will appear here daily until you do.

In The Rigging

Coming from an incumbent President of the United States, "I could only lose a rigged election" is full strength, full throttle stuff. But of course, it might be true. Next year, only a rigged election could keep Labour in Overall Control of Durham County Council. Not that anyone here would bat an eyelid. We are used to these people. I have lost many an election in my time, but only my attempt to enter the hallowed portals of County Hall has been rigged.

I was never going to win, but that was not good enough. I had to be humiliated, recorded as having taken far fewer votes than everyone knew that I really had, and denied a Parish Council seat on the same day. I have never heard of anyone else who had failed to win a Parish Council seat on the same day as they had sought a District or County seat in the same ward. It did not really happen. Likewise, I took more than 203 votes in each of Lanchester and Burnhope. But hey, ho. Like everyone else, I witnessed far worse abuses at the count that night, committed entirely in the open. Welcome to County Durham.

Two and a half years later, I had to deal with County Hall again, because it was running the parliamentary elections on its patch. Again, I was never going to win. But again, that was not good enough. Unlike every other candidate across six constituencies, I was not given an appointment time to submit my nomination papers and my deposit, so that in the end I just had to turn up and insist on being seen. I was simply never sent the electoral register.

Some of them later corrected the error, although not through any intervention of mine, but several of the local and regional media, which are closely connected to the right-wing Labour machine, did not initially mention my name or total when reporting the result at North West Durham. All right, I had come bottom of the poll. But even so.

The word on the street seems to be that I am already standing for Parliament next time, and that that is a given. Well, the judge specifically left that option open, because like everyone else he knew what he was dealing with. See above. The judge, the Police, the Probation Service, the court-appointed psychiatrist, the people who run unpaid work when it is running: all of them openly regard me as obviously innocent, and all those are able to say so, say so out loud. Again I say that only ballot-rigging could save the Labour Party in County Durham next year.

So here is the deal. If by Easter of next year I had raised £20,000, then I would spend half of that slowly until the dissolution of the present Parliament, and the other half in the course of the official campaign leading up to the next General Election. I would do so in the constituency where the most people had asked me to stand. If this appeal were to be launched and never reach its £20,000 target, then any monies raised would be donated to charity. You might very well find it more efficient to give your money directly to charity. But if we did raise the money, then my candidacy would go ahead. Sometime next month, watch this space.

You Will Not Replace Us

Red-Brown hunters, you will presumably be straining every sinew to prevent the election of Joe Biden, endorsed as he has been by Richard Spencer. Of course, insofar as there has ever been anything Red about you, then you have always been the real Red-Browns.

You have cheered on out and proud Nazis in Kosovo, Bosnia, Ukraine, Venezuela, Bolivia, and now Belarus. You have bombed away in support of the nearest thing to the Third Reich since its fall in Kosovo, Bosnia, Iraq, Libya and Syria. You have your eye on Lebanon right now, as ever on the orders of the regime in Saudi Arabia, which is one of the two worst in the world. You side uncritically with Narendra Modi.

You support NATO, which commits us to the defence of Turkish Islamists and of assorted Eastern European neo-Nazis, with more to come, along with Latin American caudillos. NATO was founded in order to annex as much as possible of the territory of, or more-or-less controlled by, a Soviet Union that had shown itself both unwilling and unable to conquer Western Europe in 1945. It has always welcomed any and everyone who shared that objective. The chilling reemergence of the white, red and white triband on the streets of Minsk is only the latest stage in that 70-year process.

Like Spencer, you are fanatically devoted to the cause of the EU, which, since we are still in the Single Market and the Customs Union, subjects us to the legislative will of Spencer's sort, frequently in the Council of Ministers, and permanently in the European Parliament.

And now, you want the next President of the United States to be Strom Thurmond's eulogist, the restorer of the federal death penalty, the father of mass incarceration and of militarised policing, a man who opposed bussing because he did not want his children to grow up in a "racial jungle", a man with a former Attorney General of California as his running mate, and a man who has accordingly been endorsed by the star turn at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville.

The Greatest Cover-Up In Modern Scottish History

Craig Murray writes: 

The greatest cover-up in modern Scottish history is underway. I am not permitted to say more at present. 

I will however venture to say that this is massively bigger than just the attempt to imprison me, that most of these documents are also being withheld from the Holyrood Inquiry. 

In stating they are banning Alex Salmond’s solicitors also from releasing any of the documents, the Crown is admitting their existence.

I have made a redaction to avoid any further accusation of jigsaw identification.

I am EXTREMELY keen for you to follow tomorrow’s procedural hearing where the question of what evidence is permitted will be addressed. That’s tomorrow, 9.45am British Summer Time. The dial in instructions are here. 

Dial (+44)-207 660 8149 

Access code 137 161 9904 

I really do not know why it is a telephone system and not internet, obviously it is the court and not me. Please do listen in. I realise nothing much happened at the last two procedural hearings, but this should be very different.

I am very anxious indeed that the powers that be should not get the impression that public interest is waning. Please do go to the linked page and check their instructions about what you are and are not allowed to do.

Oliver Kamm Candidacy Watch: Day 11

Oliver Kamm, since you are a Starmer supporter, if you were to be the Labour candidate here at North West Durham next time (and they still cannot find one for this highly marginal seat), then I would put up as an Independent again.

You could have the Labour nomination here with one tweet: "In support of @Keir_Starmer, I am the @UKLabour candidate at North West Durham, there being no other. @NWDurhamLabour @CoDurhamLabour @RicHolden @TheNorthernEcho @itvtynetees @BBCLN" 

Get it tweeted. Go on. I dare you. Put up or shut up. A daily update will appear here until you do.

Oliver Kamm Arrest Watch: Day 19

There is more evidence to arrest Oliver Kamm than there was to convict me, and he clams up over on Guido Fawkes when asked whether or not he has been arrested. So, has Oliver Kamm been arrested? If not, why not?

Kamm faked a death threat against himself, and he used a contact at Durham, who ought also to be arrested and who may in fact have been so, to try and pin it on me. That incident is so similar to the one of which I was convicted as to call into question my conviction. A daily update will appear here until further notice.

Oliver Kamm Libel Watch: Day 50

Oliver Kamm, you are a liar, and as such you are unfit to hold your position on The Times.

Sue me.

Your bizarre CapX article, as well as numerous other statements of yours since then, have had nothing to do with the substance of my previous court case, in relation to which I maintain my innocence. So they have not already been tested in court. And they are lies.

You made up the "anti-Semitic death threat" against yourself, in a language that I could not read, and even though you are not Jewish. I was present when the Police literally laughed it out.

Like me, the Police know how you did it; they know who in Durham you used, and so do I. Eventually, you will either do time for this, or it will see you sent to a psychiatric institution, possibly both.

You are a stalker with an acknowledged history of mental illness, and I can see less and less reason why I ought not to move to have you committed. Or sent to prison. By the criteria that were used to convict me, then that would be an open and shut case.

Next time that you try and frame someone, then do not use a language, and even a script, that your target cannot read. The Police tend to laugh out that kind of thing.

Oliver Kamm, you are a liar, and as such you are unfit to hold your position on The Times. Sue me. This post will appear here daily until you do.

Yellow At The Edges?

Unlike the Labour Party, both candidates to lead the Liberal Democrats, one of whom was a Cabinet Minister in the Coalition, are now calling for the Universal Basic Income and for higher taxes on the very rich. Whether or not they mean it, they are saying it. And their party has been in government a lot more recently than Labour has.

Both Ed Davey and Layla Moran also admit that the policy of a second referendum on EU membership, in order to campaign for a Remain vote, had been electorally toxic, even to the point of losing Jo Swinson her own seat. I remember telling supporters of Owen Smith that trying to tell people to vote again until they gave the right answer would be "ballot box cancer" in places like North West Durham. I was right.

Not that Labour ever quite said that it would campaign for a Remain vote. But of course the policy of a second referendum was meaningless without that implication. And of the 56 English and Welsh seats that Labour lost in 2019, 54 had voted Leave in 2016. In the meantime, all 56 had of course voted for Jeremy Corbyn and his programme in 2017.

The man who lost Labour the 2019 General Election so catastrophically, by losing it the Red Wall probably forever, was not Corbyn, but the Shadow Brexit Secretary to whom, yes, Corbyn was wrong to capitulate. That Shadow Brexit Secretary was Keir Starmer, under whom Labour is accordingly always eight to 10 points behind.

Ally Your Thinking

NATO has never been "an alliance of democracies". Whatever else Salazar's Portugal may have been, it was not a democracy. It was, however, a founder member of NATO, which was a cold strategic alliance, and those are not necessarily objectionable in principle. 

NATO, though, was a cold strategic alliance to wage war on the Soviet Union, the simple failure of which to keep on marching all the way to the Atlantic in 1945 had shown that it had neither the means nor the will to invade Western Europe. 

NATO welcomed anyone who was opposed to the Soviet Union, on whatever grounds. Key figures in its foundation included recent Nazi officers, such as were also prominent in the foundation of West Germany, and in the foundation of what was always intended to become the European Union. 

Over the Wall, one of the East German Bloc Parties, complete with reserved seats in the Volkskammer, was the NDPD, specifically for former Nazi Party members and supporters, although it was often observed that there were in fact more former Nazi Party members in the Communist Party than the entire membership of the NDPD.

In 1968, long after East Germany professed to have eradicated all trace of Nazism, the new Constitution still felt the need to commit it to doing so. No one in West Germany even pretended, not really. The obituaries of Helmut Schmidt and Helmut Kohl were as frank as they themselves had always been. And then there was Austria.

The EU gives the frankest of Fascists more power than anything else in the world. They are routinely in the governing coalitions that make up the Council of Ministers, and they are always a bloc in the European Parliament, meaning that they have at least some say over the legislation that binds more than half a billion people. Since we remain in the Single Market and the Customs Union, that includes the people of the United Kingdom.

Today, NATO membership commits us to the defence of Islamist Turkey, with NATO's own barmy strategic terms making Turkey the second most important member. NATO membership commits us to the defence of assorted neo-Nazis in Eastern Europe, with plans for more to be added. And NATO membership will soon commit us to the defence of Latin American caudillos.

Get the message. However bad Kemalism, or Arab nationalism, or anything else in that vein may be, the Islamist alternative, centred on our dear friends in Saudi Arabia, is even worse. However bad, or at best disappointing, the expressions of Latin American Leftism may be, the Fascist alternatives, technically so named, are even worse. 

And the political divisions of much of Eastern Europe remain defined by the sides that were taken during the German Occupation. Guess which of those sides identifies with NATO and the EU, both of which have always been very good to that side. As we saw in Ukraine. And as we now see with the return of the white, red and white flag to the streets of Belarus.

Independent Means?

Apparently, the preferred term is "unofficial". An independent Scotland would use the pound sterling "unofficially". 

The average age in Scotland is 40, and the average income is 100 per cent of the United Kingdom average. That middle-aged and middle-class society is to be invited to put its mortgages and its pension schemes into an unofficial currency. We can all guess what its answer is going to be. For the second time. 

As for joining the euro, in 2011 the Irish Budget was subject to a full parliamentary debate in Berlin before anyone in Dublin had seen it. Where was the independence there?

The SNP envisages that monetary policy would be set in either London or Frankfurt, that foreign and defence policy would largely be set in Washington, and that trade policy, among very much else, would be set in Brussels. Where would be the independence in any of that?

Oliver Kamm Candidacy Watch: Day 10

Oliver Kamm, since you are a Starmer supporter, if you were to be the Labour candidate here at North West Durham next time (and they still cannot find one for this highly marginal seat), then I would put up as an Independent again.

You could have the Labour nomination here with one tweet: "In support of @Keir_Starmer, I am the @UKLabour candidate at North West Durham, there being no other. @NWDurhamLabour @CoDurhamLabour @RicHolden @TheNorthernEcho @itvtynetees @BBCLN" 

Get it tweeted. Go on. I dare you. Put up or shut up. A daily update will appear here until you do.

Oliver Kamm Arrest Watch: Day 18

There is more evidence to arrest Oliver Kamm than there was to convict me, and he clams up over on Guido Fawkes when asked whether or not he has been arrested. So, has Oliver Kamm been arrested? If not, why not?

Kamm faked a death threat against himself, and he used a contact at Durham, who ought also to be arrested and who may in fact have been so, to try and pin it on me. That incident is so similar to the one of which I was convicted as to call into question my conviction. A daily update will appear here until further notice.

Oliver Kamm Libel Watch: Day 49

Oliver Kamm, you are a liar, and as such you are unfit to hold your position on The Times.

Sue me.

Your bizarre CapX article, as well as numerous other statements of yours since then, have had nothing to do with the substance of my previous court case, in relation to which I maintain my innocence. So they have not already been tested in court. And they are lies.

You made up the "anti-Semitic death threat" against yourself, in a language that I could not read, and even though you are not Jewish. I was present when the Police literally laughed it out.

Like me, the Police know how you did it; they know who in Durham you used, and so do I. Eventually, you will either do time for this, or it will see you sent to a psychiatric institution, possibly both.

You are a stalker with an acknowledged history of mental illness, and I can see less and less reason why I ought not to move to have you committed. Or sent to prison. By the criteria that were used to convict me, then that would be an open and shut case.

Next time that you try and frame someone, then do not use a language, and even a script, that your target cannot read. The Police tend to laugh out that kind of thing.

Oliver Kamm, you are a liar, and as such you are unfit to hold your position on The Times. Sue me. This post will appear here daily until you do.

Advance and Retreat

Apparently, there are Conservative MPs who hate Dominic Cummings so much that they are prepared to vote against the creation of the British Advanced Research Projects Agency. 

There cannot be enough of them to defeat it in the present parliamentary situation. But they clearly assume that the Labour Party is going to vote against it. 

Just think about that. And despair.

Horizontal Thinking

While the official response to Covid-19 in Belarus has been criminally irresponsible, it did make possible the enormous celebrations of the seventy-fifth anniversary of Victory Day. Had I been elected to Parliament last year, then I might even have taken the risk and turned up in Minsk on that Day, because to secure that Victory, Belarus lost one third of its total population. 

Those people did not die under a horizontal triband of white, red and white. That was the flag of the collaborators with the Nazis. And that is the flag of those who, having failed to dislodge the appalling Alexander Lukashenko at the ballot box (he did not take the 80 per cent of the vote that he claims, but he will certainly have taken 60 per cent), have taken to the streets instead, much as they have been known to take to the streets to deny the legitimacy of the election of Donald Trump, or to deny the legitimacy of the result of the Brexit referendum.

Of course there are NATO troops on the borders of Belarus. That has never been any kind of secret. Up to now, they have not been aimed at Belarus, or at least not primarily. But they have been there. They still are. Of course they are. And NATO material routinely glorifies Nazi collaborators as valiant resisters of the Soviet Union. The United States Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, marked the seventy-fifth anniversary of VE Day by issuing a joint statement with the Foreign Ministers of countries that had not only had Axis regimes until that Day, but were now governed by politicians in those same political traditions. Neither Belarus nor Russia was invited to participate. 

Yet in Russia no less than in Belarus, the West's favoured alternatives make no attempt to disguise who or what they are. They wave the black, yellow and white flag of Russian ultranationalism in all its anti-modern, anti-urban, anti-scientific and anti-Semitic awfulness. Or they are the National Bolsheviks, whose flag is that of Nazi Germany, but with a black hammer and sickle in place of the swastika. Or they are neocon stooges for whom next to nobody votes, so that it is difficult to see why anyone in Russia would consider either Boris Nemtsov or Alexei Navalny important enough to kill. Vladimir Putin's faults do not make his opponents any less horrendous.

I do not blame Times and Guardian types who identify with their own sort of people when they take to the streets to support globalisation, NATO and the EU against the doubts of recalcitrant commoners. But in like manner, those types more than cheered on literal Nazis in Bosnia, Kosovo, Ukraine and Venezuela, as we tried to explain to them at the time. In like manner, they more than cheered on Saudi-backed Islamists in Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq, Libya and Syria, as we tried to explain to them at the time. And they ended up surrendering to the Taliban in Afghanistan, just as we had predicted from the start.

As for the fact that Britain is arming the regime in Belarus, Britain also arms the vastly worse regime in Saudi Arabia, which inspires, funds, supplies and directs terrorism right here on the streets of Britain. After all these years, we are still trying to tell you.

Middle Money

The average age in Scotland is 40, and the average income is 100 per cent of the United Kingdom average. 

Scotland is a middle-aged and middle-class place, full of people who understand perfectly well that the licensed printing of the Bank of England's currency with Scottish branding on it does not constitute the issuing of currency.

It is said that Scotland would use the pound sterling voluntarily, as Panama uses the United States dollar. But nobody in the Federal Reserve gives a damn about Panama. Panama is hardly the happiest point of historical reference when discussing the economy of an independent Scotland. 

And middle-aged, middle-class people will not be voting to put their mortgages or their pension schemes into a foreign currency that their country used voluntarily.

Belt and Road Initiative

Hong Kong was largely a Scottish colony. So how about a network of 20 new towns at equal distances across the North of Scotland, each to be populated in the first instance by 15,000 people from Hong Kong?

To match the Central Belt, it might be called the Northern Belt. Better yet, since the towns would be linked to each other by transport infrastructure, it might be called the Belt and Road.

A Mighty Blow

Peter Hitchens writes:

If you want to ruin any cause, or put people off any product, surely the best way of doing so is to associate it with old people, especially those trying to be hip and sexy?

I always thought that cigarettes could have been discouraged most effectively by a series of spoof advertisements in which old, wrinkled, sagging people tried grotesquely to be alluring, while smoking. 

People fear being old so much more than they fear death, as death is harder to imagine. Whereas old people (and anybody over about 35 is decrepit in the eyes of the young) are still all over the place. 

So perhaps the entertainer Madonna, now 62, has unwittingly dealt a mighty blow against marijuana legalisation by posing with a spliff sticking out of her mouth, as she holds a tray of marijuana buds and rolling papers. 

She tries hard to look foxy and wicked as she does this, but succeeds only in looking over-eager and pathetic. 

The truth is that there is nothing especially rebellious about smoking dope, which has been wrecking the minds of its users since the early 1960s. 

The police of most major nations, including the UK, stupidly no longer try to enforce the laws against its use. 

Last week, figures for England and Wales showed a near-collapse in the numbers of fines for possession, and of the empty ‘cannabis warnings’ which police officers hand out to pretend they are doing something.

Meanwhile, the miserable absence of research on mental illness and the crime linked to it conceals the terrible damage that this drug is doing to many of its users and to society.

And politicians inside all three major parties foolishly seek to use the virus crisis as a pretext to legalise it, in the hope of raising taxes. 

I’ve tried using facts and reason against this idiotic policy for years, to little effect. 

But perhaps the sight of a 62-year-old woman with a joint between her lips, pretending to be modish, will finally put an end to marijuana’s cool image. 

I can only hope.

Oliver Kamm Candidacy Watch: Day Nine

Oliver Kamm, since you are a Starmer supporter, if you were to be the Labour candidate here at North West Durham next time (and they still cannot find one for this highly marginal seat), then I would put up as an Independent again.

You could have the Labour nomination here with one tweet: "In support of @Keir_Starmer, I am the @UKLabour candidate at North West Durham, there being no other. @NWDurhamLabour @CoDurhamLabour @RicHolden @TheNorthernEcho @itvtynetees @BBCLN" 

Get it tweeted. Go on. I dare you. Put up or shut up. A daily update will appear here until you do.

Oliver Kamm Arrest Watch: Day 17

There is more evidence to arrest Oliver Kamm than there was to convict me, and he clams up over on Guido Fawkes when asked whether or not he has been arrested. So, has Oliver Kamm been arrested? If not, why not?

Kamm faked a death threat against himself, and he used a contact at Durham, who ought also to be arrested and who may in fact have been so, to try and pin it on me. That incident is so similar to the one of which I was convicted as to call into question my conviction. A daily update will appear here until further notice.

Oliver Kamm Libel Watch: Day 48

Oliver Kamm, you are a liar, and as such you are unfit to hold your position on The Times.

Sue me.

Your bizarre CapX article, as well as numerous other statements of yours since then, have had nothing to do with the substance of my previous court case, in relation to which I maintain my innocence. So they have not already been tested in court. And they are lies.

You made up the "anti-Semitic death threat" against yourself, in a language that I could not read, and even though you are not Jewish. I was present when the Police literally laughed it out.

Like me, the Police know how you did it; they know who in Durham you used, and so do I. Eventually, you will either do time for this, or it will see you sent to a psychiatric institution, possibly both.

You are a stalker with an acknowledged history of mental illness, and I can see less and less reason why I ought not to move to have you committed. Or sent to prison. By the criteria that were used to convict me, then that would be an open and shut case.

Next time that you try and frame someone, then do not use a language, and even a script, that your target cannot read. The Police tend to laugh out that kind of thing.

Oliver Kamm, you are a liar, and as such you are unfit to hold your position on The Times. Sue me. This post will appear here daily until you do.

Step Up

I do hope that you will enjoy next week's 2020 Republican National Convention, after this week's 1996 Republican National Convention. 

Free-marketeering without limit, equally hawkish towards the external and the internal colonies, and socially liberal among bourgeois white folks, but all with a garnish of the more tasteful outward piety of what used to be called mainline Protestantism, or of what might now be called mainline Catholicism. Good luck to next week's circus as it tries to sell this heavy dose of nostalgia to cure insomnia as the looming threat of a coup by Black Lives Matter and by Antifa. 

No one runs for the United States Senate at 29, in order to be sworn it at the constitutional minimum age of 30, except as part of a long-term campaign for the Presidency. Work out when Joe Biden must have decided to make his Senate bid, and you will see that he has been running for President for 50 years.

Ah, the United States Senate. The only reason to have any second chamber is the view that some people's votes should count more than others, but I have given up trying to explain that to anyone. Apparently, there just has to be one. This has nothing to do with federalism. The United Kingdom is still not a federal state. France is not remotely one. Every American state apart from Nebraska has two chambers, as have five Australian states, and as have six Indian states. There are bicameral legislatures in tiny jurisdictions the world over. And all because the common herd cannot quite be trusted.

Well, if we must have one, then let it have 100 members, like the United States Senate. Let 50 Senators be elected from among self-nominees, with each of us voting for one candidate, and with the top 50 elected at the end. There would be no deposit, or anything like that. Electors and candidates would have to be British citizens resident in Great Britain, or British or Irish citizens resident in Great Britain or Northern Ireland. There would be a minimum age of 21 to vote, and of 30 to stand. Any casual vacancy would be filled by the next highest scoring candidate who was willing and able to step up.

And let 50 Senators be elected from among self-nominees, with each of us voting for one candidate, and with the top 50 elected at the end. There would be no deposit, or anything like that. Electors would have to be resident in the United Kingdom, but there would be no nationality requirement. You can already stand for Parliament from anywhere in the world, so there would neither a nationality requirement nor a residency requirement to be a candidate. There would be a minimum age of 16 to vote, but posthumous sons have always been able to inherit peerages at birth, so there would be no minimum age to stand. Any casual vacancy would be filled by the next highest scoring candidate who was willing and able to step up.

Fully Available For Public Inspection

My friend Paul Warren has created a petition, which remains relevant, to "Make the algorithm used to adjust this year's A-Level results fully available for public inspection."

If it reaches 100,000 signatures within six months, then it will be considered for debate in Parliament. Please sign it here.

Prospective?

There was never going to be a "Reform Party". Nigel Farage's wholly expected return to full-time, paid media work adds the Brexit Party's total at last year's General Election to the Conservative Party's tally in each seat. 

Here at North West Durham, where the Brexit Party finished third, that adds 3193. Watts Stelling, by then in his seventies, is unlikely to give it a fourth go in 2024, so that is further 1216. 

Only some of my 414 were and are sitting Labour Councillors with every intention of seeking reelection as such next year, but leave aside those of my voters who would otherwise have voted Conservative. 

Even without them, then Richard Holden's working majority is now a healthy 5523. It is no wonder that the Constituency Labour Party cannot find a Prospective Parliamentary Candidate for North West Durham.

Oliver Kamm Candidacy Watch: Day Eight

Oliver Kamm, since you are a Starmer supporter, if you were to be the Labour candidate here at North West Durham next time (and they still cannot find one for this highly marginal seat), then I would put up as an Independent again.

You could have the Labour nomination here with one tweet: "In support of @Keir_Starmer, I am the @UKLabour candidate at North West Durham, there being no other. @NWDurhamLabour @CoDurhamLabour @RicHolden @TheNorthernEcho @itvtynetees @BBCLN" 

Get it tweeted. Go on. I dare you. Put up or shut up. A daily update will appear here until you do.

Oliver Kamm Arrest Watch: Day 16

There is more evidence to arrest Oliver Kamm than there was to convict me, and he clams up over on Guido Fawkes when asked whether or not he has been arrested. So, has Oliver Kamm been arrested? If not, why not?

Kamm faked a death threat against himself, and he used a contact at Durham, who ought also to be arrested and who may in fact have been so, to try and pin it on me. That incident is so similar to the one of which I was convicted as to call into question my conviction. A daily update will appear here until further notice.

Oliver Kamm Libel Watch: Day 47

Oliver Kamm, you are a liar, and as such you are unfit to hold your position on The Times.

Sue me.

Your bizarre CapX article, as well as numerous other statements of yours since then, have had nothing to do with the substance of my previous court case, in relation to which I maintain my innocence. So they have not already been tested in court. And they are lies.

You made up the "anti-Semitic death threat" against yourself, in a language that I could not read, and even though you are not Jewish. I was present when the Police literally laughed it out.

Like me, the Police know how you did it; they know who in Durham you used, and so do I. Eventually, you will either do time for this, or it will see you sent to a psychiatric institution, possibly both.

You are a stalker with an acknowledged history of mental illness, and I can see less and less reason why I ought not to move to have you committed. Or sent to prison. By the criteria that were used to convict me, then that would be an open and shut case.

Next time that you try and frame someone, then do not use a language, and even a script, that your target cannot read. The Police tend to laugh out that kind of thing.

Oliver Kamm, you are a liar, and as such you are unfit to hold your position on The Times. Sue me. This post will appear here daily until you do.

Something About Owen Jones

Who cares?

The licensed Left is of no interest to anyone. If he were really one of us, then he would never get the gigs. 

A column on The Guardian? Real radicals are banned from the comments threads underneath such things.

The Chips Are Down

In the best tradition of Juan Guaidó, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya is a handpicked potato, to be served with the mince as which she is as thick.

The liberal bourgeoisie's taking to the streets to chant its love of NATO and the EU, while demanding that the votes of the beastly little common people be annulled, is no more edifying in Belarus than it is in Britain, where it has also been happening.

Either spectacle is no more sympathetic than the chanting of similar types for the United States to invade Hong Kong, or for the CIA to stage a coup on behalf of actual Nazis in Venezuela, as previously in Ukraine.

There is plenty wrong with Alexander Lukashenko, and he did not win by anything like as much as he claims to have won. But he really did win. As Nicolás Maduro really did win. As Evo Morales really did win. As Viktor Yanukovych really did win. And as Brexit really did win. 

The kind of people who won it for Brexit are the kind of people who won it for Maduro and for Lukashenko, even if only for the want of anything better. The people who want to remove Maduro and Lukashenko like this are the people who think that our votes should not and do not count as much as their own, if at all.

Imagine that an incoming Biden Administration announced its recognition of Keir Starmer, who is strikingly like Kamala Harris in many ways, as the "legitimate" Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, in order to stop the application of Modern Monetary Theory so as to reverse the deindustrialising effects of globalisation, in order to take Britain back into the EU by acceding to the Schengen Agreement and by adopting the euro, and in order to ensure British participation in any future war that Saudi Arabia might care to order up, from the oilfields of Venezuela, to the lithium mines of Bolivia, to anywhere that, by allying with Russia, might ally indirectly with Syria and Iran.

Antidote

Characters as obviously dodgy as Boris Berezovsky and Alexander Litvinenko should never have been allowed into this country, where their presence served only to endanger our own people.

But the BBC has made the lead news the possible poisoning, in Russia, of a man who wants to be the corrupt dictator of Russia in place of the present corrupt dictator of Russia. Who cares?

We know what, or at any rate whom, Alexei Navalny is against. But what is he for? What does he want instead? There is a reason why those who are supposed to ask questions on our behalf never ask that question.

And notice that he is not dead. If Vladimir Putin is the Great Poisoner, then he is not very good at it. If it is not the Skripals doing the hokey cokey across Salisbury Plain, then it is this. 

If Putin, or the GRU, or any of that lot, wanted you dead, then you would be dead. Not of some exotic poison that did not work, anyway. But of a bullet to the head.

In Jeopardy

Keir Starmer’s proudest achievement is to have abolished the immemorial protection against double jeopardy, since nothing else concrete ever came out of the Stephen Lawrence case. Is the Metropolitan Police no longer racist? Go round London and tell the black boys that. Go on. I dare you.

The Conservative Party did nothing to defend that civil liberty, of course. It has never suggested restoring it. And it is no surprise that Starmer is re-suspending Labour Party members the complaints against whom have already been investigated and dismissed.

One’s attitude to the Palestinian struggle is the litmus test of one’s attitude to the specific phenomenon of white violence against people of colour throughout the world, including in Britain, and until you understand that, then you have not begun to understand anything.

As much as anything else, Labour is being impolitic here, choosing a tiny group of people who rarely vote Labour over several far larger ones whose members have mostly done so hitherto. Now those members might just stop voting altogether, and scores of Labour seats will be lost by default. 

The Oxford English Dictionary defines anti-Semitism as “Hostility to or prejudice against Jews”, and that definition is sufficient. The IHRA Definition is a denial of BAME, migrant and refugee, and therefore working-class, experience redolent of the Windrush scandal and of the fire at Grenfell Tower. In forbidding or curtailing criticism of a particular foreign state, the IHRA Definition is incompatible with national sovereignty.

The denial of the ancient indigenous Christian presence in the Holy Land, where it created modern Palestinian identity, contributes significantly to the worldwide persecution of Christians. The Palestinian Christians’ ancestors predated the Israelite Conquest, they founded Jerusalem, and they became Christian when or before the Roman Empire did.

They adopted Arabic at the time of the Islamic Conquest, including the conquest of a Jerusalem that had by then been entirely Christian for centuries; that Conquest was contemporaneous with the Saxon Conquest of another remote former Roman province, meaning that England and Palestine are the same age, as well as sharing a Patron Saint. He is also shared with Egypt and Lebanon. 

Although the Tomb of Saint George at his birthplace, which is now known as Lod and which is the location of Israel’s principal airport, has become a shadow of its former self. It was once a major focus of unity between Christians and Muslims. But three quarters of those who practised that devotion were violently expelled in 1948. On what remains, see here. 

But it is wrong to tell Israelis to “go home” when the State of Israel was founded in the year that the Empire Windrush docked at Tilbury. There are now fourth generation Israelis, who are very much at home.