Nominations have been closed for 41 weeks, so when is the election?
If you know, you know.
Industrialisation and then nationalisation did for the gentry in these parts a long time ago. What little there is, has nothing like the clout that it would have in an agricultural area. So without the NUM, then you can only even ask for names from certain middle-class networks that, again, are much smaller here than they are in many other places. That has now been the case for at least a generation. Yet once you have taken out those with potential conflicts of interest, the already overcommitted, and the emphatically retired, then even out of a population of, say, 90,000, you can arrive at one name. This I know, because twice in six years, that one name has been David Lindsay.
Not that this is a new phenomenon. I had two school governorships by the time that I was 23 because there was "no one else", and that was only 15 years after the end of the Strike. But then, look at, for example, the counties of what had been Oliver Cromwell's Eastern Association, and tell me how much trace of that remained in 1675. Have Essex, Hertfordshire, Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridgeshire, Huntingdonshire and Lincolnshire been centres of radicalism in general, and of republicanism in particular, at any time since? Similarly, in 2019, more people in County Durham voted Conservative than voted Labour at a General Election, while in 2021, under Keir Starmer, Labour lost control of Durham County Council. Even if those results were to be reversed, then the old order, unquestioned and unquestionable, would still be gone forever. It already seems as distant as the Ironsides.
Within the new order, when I tell you that there is going to be a hung Parliament, then you can take that to the bank. I spent the 2005 Parliament saying that it was psephologically impossible for the Heir to Blair's Conservative Party to win an overall majority. I predicted a hung Parliament on the day that the 2017 General Election was called, and I stuck to that, entirely alone, all the way up to the publication of the exit poll eight long weeks later. And on the day that Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister, I predicted that a General Election between him and Starmer would result in a hung Parliament.
I have no plan to join the Workers Party of Britain, although nor would I expect to stand against it. If, however, it did not contest North Durham, then I would. 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. We have made a start.
Fascinating. Didn't your old school want you as a governor for years?
ReplyDeleteLet me take you back 32 years, to the beginning of September 1992, three weeks short of my fifteenth birthday. The most inexplicable governor had been appointed to my school. To this day, no one will own up to having had any part in that appointment. I was not yet a member of any party, but I was becoming active politically, and in between more pressing matters, the local Labour operation was vaguely planning to bring me in. Entirely unknown to me, the decision was made that I would at some future time be an acceptable governor, in stark contrast to the one who had just assumed office. I repeat that I was not quite 15 and had no idea that any of this was happening.
DeleteFast forward to the Golden Britpop Summer of 1995. School was at its wit's end, and by then what in those days could in these parts still call itself "the party" wanted to exercise the County Council's power of recall and instead install me with effect from 23rd September, my eighteenth birthday. That would have made me a governor for almost the whole of my Upper Sixth, so school understandably put the kibosh on it, although on the clear understanding that it did want me as soon as was quite decent.
A year later, when the problem governor's term would have been up, then school and the party were aligned and allied in my favour, but the distant Diocese was unconvinced, since at that point I was still the only person who did not know that I was eventually going to go over to Rome. The day had yet to come when the late Bishop Kevin Dunn would promise to initiate my candidacy for this largely Catholic parliamentary seat by publicly anointing me. When I suggested accompaniment by Zadok the Priest, then he replied, "Why not?" He was not joking. Requiescat in pace.
Therefore, I did not become a governor a fortnight after my A-level results, and three weeks shy of my nineteenth birthday. But four years later, I had already been a governor of a primary school for the first of eight years, and I had been safely aboard the Barque of Saint Peter for a year. When I had written to school to request prayers upon my reception, then it had offered a Mass of Thanksgiving. Yes, really. It was the usual weekly Mass, but it was said for that intention. I got a card. The funny governor's days were numbered, and no third term was awarded in 2000. Instead, I came into my inheritance at last. In both cases when I have been made a school governor, one primary and one secondary, the place has initially still had the same Headmaster as when I had been a pupil. At the comp, a mere four years after I had left, he greeted me with, "Good afternoon, Mr Lindsay." "It's all right," I replied, "you can call me David if you like, George."
I keep being told that I ought to be brought back, but that is unlikely to happen in the near future, although the Council no longer has any role in the matter, it is anyway no longer under Labour control, and the Diocese has already caused any problem at that end to disappear into thin air. I am terribly flattered, of course, and I have never stopped knowing a lot of what went on. Yes, I do mean never. The present Governing Body is perhaps a unique concentration of my parliamentary voters; they account for at least a large minority of it. A recent reappointment, after a break of some years, had in the meantime signed my nomination papers at the last General Election. More than one member was a character witness at my sentencing. So never say never, but not for quite a while yet.