Vigilantia

In between removing its Leader on the orders of a tiny clique of individual donors, what remains of the Labour Party in Scotland has decided that its candidate at Rutherglen and Hamilton West is going to be the man who lost the seat to the awesomely impressive Margaret Ferrier in the first place. That man, Ged Killen, resigned from Jeremy Corbyn’s front bench in order to vote in favour of the Single Market. 

I know that George Galloway can be difficult. But he was supposed to lose his deposit at Bradford West in 2012, yet he took 55.9 per cent of the vote in an eight-way split, and he topped the poll in every ward, including those which were more than 90 per cent white. Rutherglen and Hamilton West will be the first by-election since Keir Starmer had become the Leader of the Labour Party. It will be for a seat that Labour had lost by a mere 5,230 votes as recently as December 2019. There are scarcely the words to describe how much we must long, and how hard we must work, for it to be won by, of all people, George Galloway.

The moneybags want the Leader of Labour in Scotland to be a scion of a dynasty that does not pay the living wage or recognise trade unions, and the head of which is the supreme ruler of 110 million people in the Pakistani Punjab. Even by the standards of these things, Labour’s electoral meltdown under this person will be exceptionally delicious.

Here at North West Durham, as at Rutherglen and Hamilton West, Labour seems set to put up the former MP who had lost it the seat. Either that, or it will be whoever the right-wing machine would have produced if the 2015 Parliament had run its course.

I like Richard Holden. I also like a lot of what is doing; his Bill to ban virginity testing is only the latest of his admirable initiatives. But he is a political opponent, who voted for the tiers, who voted for the Brexit sellout, and so on. I am better than the former MP who lost her seat to him. And I am better than any Labour Rightist whatever. I just am.