They are losing their minds over Claire Fox's peerage. It is all great fun.
The abolition of the House of Lords has been the policy of the Liberal Democrats and of the Greens throughout the existence of those parties. Both have members in that House. In the case of the Lib Dems, 89 of them. The President of Plaid Cymru also sits as a Peer of the Realm.
Moreover, the abolition of the House of Lords has been at least notionally the policy of the Conservative Party since William Hague became Leader, 23 years ago. In those days, Daily Telegraph editorials used to call for an elected second chamber and for same-sex marriage, leading Tony Blair himself to rule them both out from the Despatch Box while the benches opposite shouted, "Why not? Why not?"
On eventually returning to office, the occupants of those benches did enact one of those things. In principle, they also remain committed to enacting the other one. As, in the last 10 years, even Labour has come to be, at least to the extent of making manifesto promises to convene some sort of committee to look into the matter.
So the huge majority of the House of Lords is no more or less hypocritical than Fox is. Most of them, however, do not strike at the heart of neoconservatism by suggesting that its formative wars in Yugoslavia might have been a bit more complicated than anyone was really supposed to admit, thereby calling into question everything from NATO expansion, to EU expansion, to subsequent wars on the liberal interventionist principles that were honed in Bosnia and Kosovo.
Jeremy Corbyn, who was right about the wars in Yugoslavia as he has been right about all of the neocon wars thereafter, has never in his life defended any specific act of IRA violence. No one who had done so could ever have retained a Labour Party membership card, or any parliamentary seat in Great Britain.
But it is Boris Johnson has who put into the House of Lords an unrepentant old stalwart of the Irish Freedom Movement, which explicitly defended the Warrington bombing, and which went on to oppose the Good Friday Agreement because that was still not the 32 County Republic.
David Aaronovitch, who has baggage of his own, once tried and failed to link Corbyn to Red Action, two members of which were convicted in relation to the Harrods bombing, and which has long been the subject of speculation around the bombing of Warrington.
But it is Johnson who has who put into the House of Lords an unrepentant old stalwart of the Revolutionary Communist Party, which shared the Red Front electoral platform with Red Action at the 1987 General Election. Corbyn, by the way, was exactly the middle-class, vegetarian, pretty much pacifist sort of left-winger that Red Action despised above all else.
At last year's European Elections, the voters of the North West, which contained Warrington, gave first place to a list headed by a veteran of dissident Irish Republicanism, and second place to a party led by a veteran supporter of Sinn Féin.
Hey, ho. Everyone knows that every British Government was in continuous contact with the IRA with a view to bringing about the only outcome that any British Government has ever really wanted, a conclusion that will now be reached in the very near future. Margaret Thatcher's "miraculous" escape at Brighton is explicable only in terms of foreknowledge. Nothing else makes any sense whatever.
There are plenty of old Tankies of an earlier generation in the Lords already, mostly of the kind that were only ever Labour Party members but if anything even harder line for that, and Kate Hoey was at various times in or around the International Marxist Group, the International Socialists, and the British and Irish Communist Organisation.
Even so, what really drives to distraction those who are letting their bellies ache over the Fox ennoblement is that they themselves were active in various fringe Left operations in the 1970s, especially in the 1980s, and sometimes in the 1990s. Few people would even remember the names of most of those factions these days. But the RCP is the one that made it, with Munira Mirza as Director of the Number 10 Policy Unit, and with Fox raised to the ermine.
Such are the fruits of understanding that what matters is to influence the people who control the Conservative Party, the Leader of which is almost always the Prime Minister, and which is wholly without anything to compare to the Labour Party's labyrinthine committee system. The Leader's word is law, usually in the most literal sense. What matters is to make your word, his word. If the RCP could manage that, then there is hope for us all yet.
The signs are propitious. Half of the Red Wall turned Blue in 2019, as most of the other half will in 2024. The Conservative Party became electorally dependent on constituencies that had voted for Corbyn in 2017, and which would have done so again if he had stuck to his Bennite guns on Brexit. Next time, it will acquire many seats that had voted for Corbyn both times.
Accordingly, and not because of Covid-19, the Government has adopted Modern Monetary Theory for the purpose of heavy reindustrialisation under close central government direction, including a strong dose of public ownership, and with the trade unions in government, where they will soon be joined by the politically black community leaders who twice mobilised Corbyn's most solid bloc of voters.
The Durham Miners' Gala is now the national cultural mainstream, with ambitious Conservative MPs anxious to be associated with it. The claim that parties may govern like this, but they do not win on this basis, was arguably refuted last year, and it will be blown out of the water when Johnson beats Keir Starmer in 2024. The Centre is the think tank for this new era. It already has plenty going on.
The abolition of the House of Lords has been the policy of the Liberal Democrats and of the Greens throughout the existence of those parties. Both have members in that House. In the case of the Lib Dems, 89 of them. The President of Plaid Cymru also sits as a Peer of the Realm.
Moreover, the abolition of the House of Lords has been at least notionally the policy of the Conservative Party since William Hague became Leader, 23 years ago. In those days, Daily Telegraph editorials used to call for an elected second chamber and for same-sex marriage, leading Tony Blair himself to rule them both out from the Despatch Box while the benches opposite shouted, "Why not? Why not?"
On eventually returning to office, the occupants of those benches did enact one of those things. In principle, they also remain committed to enacting the other one. As, in the last 10 years, even Labour has come to be, at least to the extent of making manifesto promises to convene some sort of committee to look into the matter.
So the huge majority of the House of Lords is no more or less hypocritical than Fox is. Most of them, however, do not strike at the heart of neoconservatism by suggesting that its formative wars in Yugoslavia might have been a bit more complicated than anyone was really supposed to admit, thereby calling into question everything from NATO expansion, to EU expansion, to subsequent wars on the liberal interventionist principles that were honed in Bosnia and Kosovo.
Jeremy Corbyn, who was right about the wars in Yugoslavia as he has been right about all of the neocon wars thereafter, has never in his life defended any specific act of IRA violence. No one who had done so could ever have retained a Labour Party membership card, or any parliamentary seat in Great Britain.
But it is Boris Johnson has who put into the House of Lords an unrepentant old stalwart of the Irish Freedom Movement, which explicitly defended the Warrington bombing, and which went on to oppose the Good Friday Agreement because that was still not the 32 County Republic.
David Aaronovitch, who has baggage of his own, once tried and failed to link Corbyn to Red Action, two members of which were convicted in relation to the Harrods bombing, and which has long been the subject of speculation around the bombing of Warrington.
But it is Johnson who has who put into the House of Lords an unrepentant old stalwart of the Revolutionary Communist Party, which shared the Red Front electoral platform with Red Action at the 1987 General Election. Corbyn, by the way, was exactly the middle-class, vegetarian, pretty much pacifist sort of left-winger that Red Action despised above all else.
At last year's European Elections, the voters of the North West, which contained Warrington, gave first place to a list headed by a veteran of dissident Irish Republicanism, and second place to a party led by a veteran supporter of Sinn Féin.
Hey, ho. Everyone knows that every British Government was in continuous contact with the IRA with a view to bringing about the only outcome that any British Government has ever really wanted, a conclusion that will now be reached in the very near future. Margaret Thatcher's "miraculous" escape at Brighton is explicable only in terms of foreknowledge. Nothing else makes any sense whatever.
There are plenty of old Tankies of an earlier generation in the Lords already, mostly of the kind that were only ever Labour Party members but if anything even harder line for that, and Kate Hoey was at various times in or around the International Marxist Group, the International Socialists, and the British and Irish Communist Organisation.
Even so, what really drives to distraction those who are letting their bellies ache over the Fox ennoblement is that they themselves were active in various fringe Left operations in the 1970s, especially in the 1980s, and sometimes in the 1990s. Few people would even remember the names of most of those factions these days. But the RCP is the one that made it, with Munira Mirza as Director of the Number 10 Policy Unit, and with Fox raised to the ermine.
Such are the fruits of understanding that what matters is to influence the people who control the Conservative Party, the Leader of which is almost always the Prime Minister, and which is wholly without anything to compare to the Labour Party's labyrinthine committee system. The Leader's word is law, usually in the most literal sense. What matters is to make your word, his word. If the RCP could manage that, then there is hope for us all yet.
The signs are propitious. Half of the Red Wall turned Blue in 2019, as most of the other half will in 2024. The Conservative Party became electorally dependent on constituencies that had voted for Corbyn in 2017, and which would have done so again if he had stuck to his Bennite guns on Brexit. Next time, it will acquire many seats that had voted for Corbyn both times.
Accordingly, and not because of Covid-19, the Government has adopted Modern Monetary Theory for the purpose of heavy reindustrialisation under close central government direction, including a strong dose of public ownership, and with the trade unions in government, where they will soon be joined by the politically black community leaders who twice mobilised Corbyn's most solid bloc of voters.
The Durham Miners' Gala is now the national cultural mainstream, with ambitious Conservative MPs anxious to be associated with it. The claim that parties may govern like this, but they do not win on this basis, was arguably refuted last year, and it will be blown out of the water when Johnson beats Keir Starmer in 2024. The Centre is the think tank for this new era. It already has plenty going on.
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