Bound, Not Gagged

Paroxysms of ecstasy from the usual orifices at the selection of Alan Strickland as the Labour candidate at Sedgefield, a mere two days after the Boundary Commission had proposed to abolish the seat. It is a sad day when the North East, which was once the clear market leader in the production of corrupt and racist Labour machine politicians, has to import the ones that London no longer wanted. Strickland makes much of being the great-grandson of a Trimdon miner, giving him the same degree of connection to the old Durham coalfield as is enjoyed by that Hetton-le-Hole miner's great-granddaughter, the Princess of Wales.

Princess Alan could perfectly easily have been a Cabinet Minister in apartheid South Africa. As Haringey Borough Council's Cabinet Member for Housing and Regeneration, Her Royal Highness was a key player in the scheme to demolish Tottenham and to build an all-white, luxury, gated community on top of it, a Triomf to its Sophiatown. For the usual kickbacks, of course.

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. If it still existed by the time of the next General Election.

Still, what goes around, comes around. The Boundary Commission's proposal to abolish North West Durham is a shameful capitulation to the right-wing Labour machine's petulant insistence that if it could no longer have this seat, then the seat itself must cease to exist. The failure to open the Labour selection process here suggests inside knowledge of the Commission's machinations. Our boundaries might always have had a sense of "Oh, well, what else could we have done?", but now we are to be split four ways. Yes, four.

The proposed new constituency of Blaydon and Consett is a crude gerrymander that should have been laughed out, although the considerable body of Independents in the Consett area, as well as in the Burnopfield and Dipton that are ridiculously going to be put into this thing, should give the smug and entitled Labour Party a run for its money, either in one of their own persons, or behind a Conservative candidate who might very well be Richard Holden.

The redrawn Bishop Auckland constituency would not only be ludicrously large, but it would not contain North West Durham wards that, if this carry on had to be done at all, would belong in that rather than in the Durham City to which they would have been reallocated. And here in Lanchester, because no one ever knows what to do with us, we are to be put into North Durham, which really does look like an act of partisan spite, although it is also of a piece with many decades of official attempts to force Lanchester people to go to Stanley for things. That is nothing against Stanley. But it is not naturally our town. Why is there such a determination to treat it as if it were?

Although we have not yet finished, some of us have spent many years fighting very hard to restore even part of the situation whereby Lanchester was well-served by public transport. The buses to and from Consett, which are from and to Durham, run twice as often as the Stanley buses during the day, and run later in the evenings. Distances on the Internet are as the crow flies; anyone with any local knowledge will take it as a given that in practice it took less long to reach either Consett or Durham from Lanchester than it took to reach Stanley.

The previous Labour administration on the County Council cut the buses as an expression of its Blairite belief that economic, social, cultural and political life should be strictly reserved for the able-bodied affluent. Politically, Lanchester would be told that again by being placed in a parliamentary constituency that contained neither Durham city centre nor Consett town centre. Moreover, the Lanchester ward includes Castleside, which is an integral part of the Consett area, and the North Durham constituency is not centred on Stanley, but on Chester-le-Street, which is not, and has no cause to be, directly linked to Lanchester. I could go on, but suffice it to say that this scheme is so absurd that it ought to be possible to defeat it, and that its defeat is a test of Rishi Sunak's loyalty to one of his own most loyal supporters.