Not Going Anywhere?

If this had been happening under a Labour Government, then there would have been a military coup by now. As it is, we are living through one of those coups when an obscure groupuscule briefly seizes the organs of the State in the expectation that whoever it presumed to represent would rise up in support. Such an uprising almost never happens, but at least the huddled masses normally just ignore the proceedings. The City and the markets have reacted furiously and decisively against their purported liberators.

Liz Truss failed at Shell, and was unemployed for several years until the Deputy Directorship of a think tank gave her a base from which to sleep her way into Parliament. Despite having glittering prizes from both Cambridge and Harvard on his CV, at 35 Kwasi Kwarteng was making so little in the City that he could afford to become an MP instead. In both cases, we now see why.

Do not underestimate quite how dangerous their agenda are. They want to do everything that the Blair Government could not get past the Labour Party in those days, although it would have had no trouble now. There must be some reason why the freeport areas need to be quite so large. What do transnational corporations want with, for example, the whole of Dartmoor? It will be something. The fuss about this should not primarily be about birds or badgers, but about people. Privatisation has moved on from selling the family silver, to selling the family. And if past privatisations are anything to go by, then the freeports will pass into the ownership of foreign states, as such. This is how wars start.

Yet to entrench all of this in perpetuity, the Conservatives and their media are determined to make Keir Starmer Prime Minister. If they were not, then they would be banging on about The Labour Files morning, noon and night. Undisputed, already in the public domain, and consisting of primary source evidence throughout, it is incontrovertible proof that the faction running the Labour Party is unfit for public life, or indeed for any sort of civilised society whatever.

But the bizarre clique that is now in power wants to get as much as possible done before it is kicked out, most Conservative MPs would prefer Starmer to Truss as Prime Minister, and Wes Streeting is everyone's best hope of privatising the NHS, although only in England, since any such privatisation would be regarded as a threat to the Union anywhere else. So it is as if this enormous story did not exist.

Likewise, you can tell how desperate most Conservative MPs and journalists are for a Starmer Government, that they are not making hay about the age-old tactics of the right-wing Labour machine at Ilford South, forging hundreds of ballot papers to install a faintly rapey veteran councillor as the parliamentary candidate; contrast his treatment with that of Kelvin Hopkins, the first MP to nominate Jeremy Corbyn for Leader. The Conservatives and their media now want the right-wing Labour machine to be the Government again. They could stop it. Yet they actively choose not to. Ask yourself why not.

Next up, watch out for Sedgefield. The Constituency Labour Party there is as right-wing as you would expect, yet even the Officers of that have felt obliged to resign en bloc after no local candidate was even so much as longlisted to seek to recover the parliamentary seat, as the party nationally sought to stitch it up for a man who could perfectly easily have been a Cabinet Minister in apartheid South Africa. 

As Deputy Leader of Haringey Council, Alan Strickland was a key player in the scheme to demolish Tottenham and build an all-white, luxury, gated community on top of it, a Triomf to its Sophiatown. In the midst of serious talk of the deployment of the Israeli Defense Forces to clear any resistance, in the manner of clearing resistance to a West Bank settlement, the then Leader of Durham County Council signed a letter to The Guardian in support of the then Leader of Haringey, Claire Kober. Her Number Two, so to speak, is now being lined up for Tony Blair's erstwhile fiefdom. Even Blair's and Phil Wilson's faithful old spear-carriers have drawn the line. By the way, Christina Rees, of whom even I had never heard until this afternoon, was a supporter of Owen Smith and then of Starmer, and her then husband was a Cabinet Minister under Blair.

Oh, well, at least as the residents of a constituency that Labour needed to win back rather than one that it was almost certain to retain, the good burghers of Trimdon and Ferryhill are not to be burdened with Eddie Izzard. Would it be impossible to have Sheffield Central contested by Tulsi Gabbard, if only as a prelude to her Presidential campaign against "an elitist cabal of warmongers who are driven by cowardly wokeness"? Alas, it would be.

Although he is by no means wrong only about gender self-identification, Izzard used to say that, "They are not women's clothes, they are my clothes, I bought them." Who could have argued with that? Yet now he calls himself "she", not as a harmless eccentricity, which some of us might have indulged to be polite or compassionate, but as a pretext for accessing women's single-sex facilities, meaning that, however regretfully, we do have to insist against it.

Meanwhile, there is still no Labour candidate here at North West Durham, which in 2019 Labour lost for the first time and by only 1,144 votes. The process of selecting one has not even begun. By contrast, I have been a candidate for North West Durham at the next General Election since even before the last one.

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, we need to hold the balance of power in the next Parliament. Owing nothing to either main party, we must be open to the better offer. There does, however, need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not.