Electoral Calculus

The victory of Ian Byrne is all the sweeter for the suitcase full of bogus postal votes that the presiding Labour Party hack will have brought in order to fix things. That hack had, in turn, been brought in from London, and some of us can say "Enough said" about the staff of the London Regional Labour Party. If right-wing Labour MPs do not experience such tight contests for reselection, then we all know why.

Even Michael Crick is now openly concerned at the "unfair, verging on corrupt" parliamentary selection processes of the Labour Party. The membership lists illegally made available to favoured candidates. The truncated timetables. The failure to make members aware of the option of a postal vote. The intimidating phone calls to members, and visits to their homes. The videos, websites and leaflets that the anointed ones are allowed to utilise far in excess of the party's own spending limits. And so much more besides.

Imagine how people who behaved like that would run the country. Of course, some of us remember when they did. I for one was entirely unsurprised at the Forde Report and The Labour Files, having been called a "Mulatto" by one of the individuals in question for nearly 20 years. Under Keir Starmer, Labour has failed to oppose most, while having no policy to repeal any, of the Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Act, the Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Act, the Nationality and Borders Act, the Elections Act, and the staggering Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act. The same approach has been adopted in relation to the even more stunning Public Order Bill.

Yet the Police have had to pay damages to five Kill the Bill protesters after last March's Police riot against them in Bristol. Starmer and Labour have well and truly chosen their side. Just as Labour opposed only the abolition of the 45p rate of income tax, while supporting every other mini-Budget measure that the Government itself has since abandoned, so Labour did not oppose the "legal but harmful" clause that the Government itself is briefing that it may drop from the Online Safety Bill. Starmer himself was a major player, both in the general persecution of journalists through Operation Elveden, and in the specific persecution of Julian Assange.

This is the Labour Party that has revived the identity card scheme that Tony Blair long ago adopted and hardened in order to outflank its originator, the then Home Secretary, Michael Howard. Whose papers would the Police demand to see? A 15-year-old Etonian, such as David Cameron was when he took cannabis? Or 15-year-old Child Q, who had not in fact taken cannabis at all? A Just Stop Oil exhibitionist? Or a striking trade unionist, picketing to protect her children's food supply?

Yvette Cooper has given a "not in front of the children" rebuke to Stephen Kinnock, who has all the intellect for which his family has always been famous. But she is the monster that inflicted the Work Capability Assessment, leading to tens of thousands of deaths, while he locked himself in his car to avoid being breathalysed, just as Starmer avoided breathalysation by running away from the scene of an accident that he had caused. Ponder that business at Durham Miners' Hall, consider that Starmer's nose grows redder with each Prime Minister's Questions, and think on.

Labour has accepted the existence of a "fiscal black hole" of £55 billion, which is a figure made up out of thin air in order to justify predetermined policies. Therefore, Labour accepts both of Jeremy Hunt's fiscal rules, that underlying debt must be falling as a proportion of GDP at the end of a five-year rolling period, and that public sector borrowing over the same period must be below three per cent of GDP, rules that are not coincidentally reminiscent of those of the eurozone, where they were suspended during the pandemic but are due to be reactivated from the end of 2023. Labour will certainly go into the next General Election with a commitment to adhere to whatever departmental spending limits it had inherited.

Of course Labour would not abolish the House of Lords, and in any case it would only fall back on that one if it had nothing to say about anything more pressing, which is everything. Of course Labour would not abolish non-domicile tax status, even though that arrangement's defenders cannot explain where its beneficiaries would go, since it exists nowhere else on Earth. And of course Labour would not impose VAT on school fees, which is not even a particularly good idea, but which is the party's perennial internal crowdpleaser, the unfulfilled promise of which will always be too useful for when Labour activists started to ask what their party was actually for.

We are heading for a hung Parliament. 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. 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. One of several key players will be George Galloway, whom I urge you to come and hear in Sunderland on Tuesday 7th February 2023 at 7pm.

I shall be contesting whichever constituency had Lanchester in it, even if the Boundary Commission had gone through with its madcap scheme to move us into North Durham, of which the Lanchester ward would therefore comprise one tenth of the population but more than half of the land area. That would be an act of pure partisan spite, like the abolition of the North West Durham seat.

It beggars belief that, being in this ward, Castleside would not be in a constituency with the word "Consett" in its name, but rather in one that was centred on Chester-le-Street. At best, although that would still be saying almost nothing, Burnhope should be in North Durham, Castleside should be in Blaydon and Consett, and Lanchester should be either in that or in City of Durham. The Burnopfield and Dipton ward, however, is indeed to be in Consett and Blaydon, despite having been in North Durham in the past.

The addition of the Lanchester ward is the only proposed change to North Durham, yet Electoral Calculus claims that that would quadruple the Labour majority from 4,742 to 16,077, higher than it had been at any of the last four General Elections, with Labour wildly improbably predicted to win every ward. Look them up. If Labour intended to run a campaign smugly based on that, then I would take great pleasure in giving it a run for its money despite the near-total lack of mine.

At Blaydon and Consett, the predicted Labour majority is 15,265, with a clean sweep of wards the suggestion of which is downright laughable, since it bears no resemblance to the results in Consett over the last 20 years. With the support of the Independents, and assuming a Liberal Democrat paper campaign, then Richard Holden, whose office is already prominent in Consett town centre, would stand every chance against an MP whose office was prominent in the centre of Blaydon.