A Second Home, Indeed

Yesterday, a ridiculous person called Siobhain McDonagh parroted to Rishi Sunak the most ignorant thing that any British Prime Minister had ever said, Margaret Thatcher's claim that the State had no money of its own, while berating him for applying the principle of universality in relation to second homes. If John McDonnell had said what McDonagh did, then she would have had a well-publicised fit.

You do not need to be told that McDonagh is a Labour MP. In 2008, she tried to stage a right-wing coup against Gordon Brown. Yes, the noted Trotskyist, Gordon Brown. In 2019, she told the BBC that any criticism of global capitalism was anti-Semitic. She is an entirely typical member of the Parliamentary Labour Party.

The PLP is not merely right-wing by comparison with Jeremy Corbyn. Like the Liberal Democrats, but unlike the people who run the Conservative Party, it believes in permanent austerity and in forever war, not due to any perceived force of circumstance, but as first principles. In the pursuit of those principles, and here it does differ from the Lib Dems, it is viciously authoritarian.

It desperately wants to complete the Blair Government's signature domestic policy of privatising the National Health Service in England. Its economic illiteracy is complete, as is its lack of the slightest comprehension of any of the numerous countries in or against which it has demanded military intervention. For all practical purposes, it would have made a Corbyn Government impossible.

On this site and in many a comments thread elsewhere, I warned against Boris Johnson for years, and years, and years. But that does not make the alternative any better, either inside or outside Johnson's party. Indeed, a deal with a man and a clique whose only political principle was a birthright to rule might be easier to cut in a hung Parliament, if we could get in 10 or 20 MPs who sought to strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty. The Labour Party is the ideological enemy of all of that.