Red Lines, Yellow Journalism

Angela Rayner is the most disappointing British politician of her generation, which is my generation. To secure disaffiliation from the Labour Party and then to build what came next, join Unite Community here. Notice that the gossip about Len McCluskey, which had been doing the rounds for years, was given top story coverage on the day that the Blairs’ bizarre shopping arrangements while in government should have received far more attention, not least because they so resembled the Starmers’. What a thing it was the hear again the name of Carole Caplin, Britain’s Joan Quigley. Every Prime Minister has a little court, but none before, nor any since until Boris Johnson, has been surrounded by quite so undistinguished a bunch as Tony Blair managed. The ear of our Head of Government was had by Caplin, Alastair Campbell, Peter Mandelson, Michael Levy, and all that trash.

Rayner made her Prime Ministerial pitch to the Far Right media on the eve of the Durham Miners’ Gala. I had promised on Twitter that I would march with the Prison Officers’ Association after the attack by Hashem Abedi in HMP Frankland. Unable to do so, I was yards away and within easy earshot of the brass bands. Although a High Court injunction prevents Prison Officers from taking industrial action, the crisis in the prisons endangers every workplace in the country, so all other trade unionists should consider taking such action until that crisis had been remedied to the satisfaction of the POA. In September, a motion to that effect should be brought both to the Trades Union Congress, where the story would be that it would pass, and to the Labour Party Conference, where the story would be that it would not.

Among those to whom the Big Meeting gave a rapturous reception were the great Eddie Dempsey, the Palestinian Ambassador Dr Husam Zumlot, and the best man at Dr Zumlot’s wedding in 2010, Jeremy Corbyn. Having long ago ceased to be a member of any political party, and having no intention of ever again joining one, I welcome the foundation of Your Party as a contribution to the struggle for economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends. That said, given the support of figures such as Zarah Sultana for Net Zero and for gender self-identification, and their ambivalence about Brexit, why not just join the Green Party? That is not a rhetorical question.

The most obvious answer is that Zack Polanski is personally implicated in the anti-Semitism scam against Corbyn, and that the Greens, of whom he is already Deputy Leader, support NATO and the war in Ukraine, in keeping with the fanaticism of the recently governing Greens in Germany. Russia hawks, you are now Trump supporters. Trump supporters, you are now Russia hawks. Would it take a heart of stone not to laugh? I famously have a heart of stone, but I am still laughing. Some of us had the sense never to have been happy that Donald Trump was President of the United States, but always to have been delighted that Kamala Harris was not, that Joe Biden no longer was, and that Hillary Clinton never had been. All four are once again on the same side. Your side. The side of Jeffrey Epstein.

 

We who recognised that our objectives were incompatible with anti-industrial Malthusianism, with the denial of material reality, and with the enforcement of global capitalism by undemocratic institutions, should continue to take every opportunity to vote for the Workers Party of Britain and for the Social Democratic Party, in that order. Those parties should continue to provide us with those opportunities, and the SDP should review its support for those who had killed British military veterans who were unarmed aid workers in Gaza, bombing them three times to make sure that they were dead. Otherwise, we may indeed need to vote instead for Your Party in the absence of the Workers Party, although never otherwise.

The British Government refuses to deny that the nightly RAF reconnaissance flights over Gaza, for which the Israelis are not even required to pay, provided the intelligence for that multiple murder. So, that is a confirmation, then. And context for the actions, whatever one may make of them as tactics or as strategy, of Palestine Action, banned by an all-or-nothing measure that required any MP voting against it to vote against banning Maniacs Murder Cult (part of the Order of the Nine Angels, itself part of the subculture that gives me most of my grief) and the Russian Imperial Movement. Legislation against criminal damage was already sufficient against Palestine Action. Branding its members and supporters “terrorists” recalls Labour in Opposition, when it usually abstained rather than oppose the then Government’s attacks on civil liberties, and when it never suggested that it might repeal even the ones against which it had voted. Both traditional conservatives and the populist Right, especially in its rapidly emerging unofficial forms, are among those defined as enemies by the ruling class. Think on. Not least in relation to Blair’s digital ID, which Conservative and Reform UK voters overwhelmingly support, with more than a third of each strongly in favour, including Sarah Pochin.

To its great credit, the RAF at every level dissented so fiercely from having to fly those missions that a few days ago, the Government had to contract them out to Sierra Nevada Corporation instead. Ignore any other version of events. The spirit of 1946 lives. There was of course a Labour Government in 1946. Britain’s best ever, but that is only a relative statement, not exclusively, yet nevertheless especially, where Abroad was concerned. As the Chagos deal unravels in terms that would force the resignation of a Prime Minister who ever really had been a human rights lawyer, remember that both of the previous betrayals of the Chagossians also happened under Labour Governments, and were indeed perpetrated by those whom the Right regarded as its two greatest lost Leaders since Hugh Gaitskell, Denis Healey and David Miliband. How the world turns, with the Palestinian Ambassador at the Gala. Things have come a long way since the days of Sam Watson, after whom a room in the Knesset building is named, who unless I am very much mistaken never served in uniform, and who remains reviled for his long tenure as General Secretary of the Durham Miners’ Association. In what was then that powerful position in the life of the nation, he acted as an unofficial Israeli Ambassador, he conspired to have Aneurin Bevan expelled from the Labour Party, he collaborated with the National Coal Board to close pits, he opposed all local strikes, he instructed local officials to support management over sackings, and accordingly he left the Durham miners with the lowest pay in the country until the strikes of 1972 and 1974, after his death. Why did they not get rid of him? He was backed by Israeli, and American, muscle, and that meant muscle.

Under the late, great Davey Hopper, the DMA was unshakeable in its support for the County Durham Teaching Assistants, whose plight was an important foretaste of Labour in office, and in whose cause I voted for Owen Temple in 2017. As a moderate conservative socially, as an immoderate left-winger economically, as an unrepentant Leave voter, and as an implacable opponent of almost any British military intervention, my politics are hardly those of the more pro-austerity and pro-war party to the Coalition the resumption of which is one of the likelier outcomes of the generally unpredictable General Election of 2029. But even the Liberal Democrats can have their moments. And with their 72 MPs, plus one for their allies in the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland, as well as their storming of Conservative municipal barns across the South and the countryside, together with their provision of the Official Opposition to Reform from Durham to Kent, it is scandalous that no national columnist is a Lib Dem, that there is so rarely a Lib Dem panellist on radio or television, and so on. They obviously do not need the publicity. What they need is the scrutiny.

During the Coalition, The Guardian, which had advocated a Lib Dem vote in 2010, published Conservatives, but not Lib Dems. To this day, they are allowed to pretend that they had been in the room only for the increase in undergraduate tuition fees. In 2019, I listened to the Lib Dem candidate for North West Durham bang on for several minutes about the Bedroom Tax. He never spoke to me again after I pointed out that his party had been in government at the time. Both parties to the Coalition were and are to blame for everything that it did, from that, to the war in Libya, to the Post Office scandal, for which Ed Davey was the Minister responsible, to the privatisation of the Royal Mail, which was done by Vince Cable. Oh, the comments that I used to have to reject when I mentioned that the Post Office had had to be cut out of the Royal Mail in 2011 so that the Royal Mail could be privatised, because the City had known, even then, about Horizon, and would therefore have refused to have bought the Royal Mail in its complete form, or to have handled the sale. On 24 May 2024, that was confirmed.

You may say that many commentators already identified as liberals. Well, Eddie Izzard identifies as a woman. But he is not one. I was once sent review copies of Oliver Kamm’s and Douglas Murray’s respective books as a kind of job lot; as essentially a single work. Centrism and official right-wing populism are both con tricks, each pretending to disagree with the other. The populism is in fact massively unpopular, while the centrism is thoroughly eccentric. I knew Edward Dutton at university. He once tried to seduce me after Mass, so I know his little secret. Dutton is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of Mankind Quarterly, which he used to edit. Another member is Dr Adel Batterjee of Jeddah, the founder of the Benevolence International Foundation, which was placed under UN sanctions because it was a front for funding al-Qaeda. In 2018, Dutton secured the publication of this masterpiece in Evolutionary Psychological Science. On the Editorial Board of that is Professor Steven Pinker, Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard. In 2021, a very short time indeed from 2018 in the life of a quarterly journal, Pinker wrote that, “Oliver Kamm’s urbanity, erudition and compassion are raised to the power of two in Mending the Mind. He put them to work in crafting this gorgeous and urgent book, and on every page they remind us of his moral that enviable gifts are no protection against the affliction of depression.” Kamm, Pinker, Dutton, Batterjee. Batterjee, Dutton, Pinker, Kamm. Truly, an Axis of Evil. Douglas Murray, indeed.

Murray was a great friend and mentee of Christopher Hitchens, whom Gore Vidal famously named his “dauphin or delfino” before outliving him, and whose dauphin or delfino Kamm comically purports to be. But when the time came, who could succeed Peter Hitchens? That old column of Alan Clark’s and Norman Tebbit’s would go to the liberal Right’s golden boy of the moment. Perhaps Sir Jake Berry, Net Zero enthusiast, Remain campaigner, and latest recruit to the party whose only Privy Counsellor had been Ann Widdecombe, faithful Junior Minister under John Major, Shadow Cabinet stalwart under William Hague, twice cheerleader for the putative Leadership of Ken Clarke, scourge of foxhunting, only Conservative MP to vote with Gordon Brown for 42-day detention without charge, autobiographical praiser of Michael Heseltine for having killed off the British coal industry, and avowed opponent of the Assisted Suicide Bill only because it contained insufficient “safeguards”. Or Tim Montgomerie, spear-carrier for the Prime Minister of Net Zero, of very big spending long before Covid-19, of the highest net migration ever, of Stonewall, of the lifting of the requirement that jobs in Britain be advertised first in Britain, of the lockdowns, of the Northern Ireland Protocol, and of the war in Ukraine. Or Dame Andrea Jenkyns, a Minister in that Government and a fanatical supporter of that Prime Minister.

Blair treated us to his view on the small boats when he had the effrontery to comment on the twentieth anniversary of the 7/7 attacks that he had caused. His solution was digital ID because of course it was. Identity cards have been the solution in search of a problem at least since Michael Howard was Home Secretary, Shadowed by Blair. Ever since, British politics has been largely defined by the unseemly bidding war between them. Now calling for digital ID, Blair is still at it. He did in fact secure passage of the Identity Cards Act 2006, but so little came of it that when it was repealed by the Identity Documents Act 2010, then that was unamended and unopposed, without even any compensation for those who had forked out for the cards. Did you ever see one? It was supposed to have been about terrorism, as everything was in those days, but the latest excuse is the boat people, as it is for everything these days. Yet just as all the 9/11 bombers had had genuine identity documents, and just as identity cards had done nothing to prevent the Madrid bombing, so the small boats are coming from France, which already has identity cards. The fallback option will be to argue that this was necessary to keep under-18s off social media, and thus to preclude events such as those depicted in Adolescence. Again, though, even in its own terms, does that work on the Continent?

The real targets are elsewhere. Both traditional conservatives and the non-Establishment populist Right are at last waking up to the fact that they are as much enemies of our rulers as the rest of us. They would be constantly ordered to show their digital ID as surely as would be, say, pro-Palestinian demonstrators, or trade unionists. The latter need not, and do not, imagine that funding the governing party would make any difference. The Government has picked its side in Birmingham, and no one is remotely surprised. A day on strike is a day without pay, so a month on strike is a month without pay. No one does that for a lark. But an eight thousand pound pay cut is this unacceptable. It ranks with Abedi’s assaults on Prison Officers, who are unjustly precluded from striking, meaning that all other trade unionists should act against the danger that their unsafe workplace posed to every workplace in the country. Stab vests were deemed necessary in order to arrest me, so how can they possibly not be issued to those who had been charged to control Abedi for, realistically, the rest of his life?

“Veterans Before Refugees” declared the Twelfth of July bonfire at Moygashel. That was the wrong way of phrasing it, but if they did not mean James Kirby, James Henderson and John Chapman, then why not? If we are to be so afraid of Iran, then why does the Department for Business and Trade still publish advice on how to trade with it and do business there? Iran’s increasing invocation of its Persian past is both a clear message to Israel and a rebuke to the extremely pro-Israeli, and overtly Israeli-backed, partisans of the ridiculous fantasist Reza Pahlavi, who is supported by a mostly elderly three per cent of Iranian-Americans, heavily concentrated in and around Los Angeles, and by almost no one else in the world. They have been prominent in the off-the-books state and institutional violence against the pro-peace encampment at UCLA. Throughout this century, the Israeli flag has been conspicuous at Far Right events the world over, and on 26 October, a march and rally in support of Stephen Yaxley-Lennon also featured most or all of the Iranian monarchist flags in Britain outside specialist museums of one or more of Persiana, royalty and vexillology. How could Yaxley-Lennon talk his way out of contesting either Nigel Farage’s or Richard Tice’s seat in 2029, with one of his supporters standing against each of Reform’s MPs, and with one of the Ballymena rioters coming for Jim Allister’s majority of 450? Ponder these things.

Not least by pondering the potential lowering of the voting age. Like the proscription of Palestine Action, and like the ongoing transmania of the Hollyoaks that I only watch in prison, this proposal has the feel of a time lag. Sometimes people should be given what they had wished for. The boys would largely vote for the most traditionalist or right-populist candidate on the ballot paper, and the girls for the wokest, who would not be the candidate of Keir Starmer. Corbyn once had a young male following, but that was a different world. Farage seems similarly out of date in his call for Proportional Representation, which if anything might now be introduced to stop Reform from winning.

If you can have sex legally at 16, but you have to be 18 to vote, then if 16-year-olds could vote, then why should 14-year-olds, and thus effectively anyone at secondary school, not be able to have sex without sanction of them or their partners? If we are going to hold the line against allowing 16-year-olds to self-identify as the opposite sex, then we need to hold the line against allowing them to vote. I have always been uncharacteristically agnostic about that one, but while the usual arguments on both sides are rubbish, this changes the game. Intentionally or otherwise, the lowering of the voting age for devolved and municipal elections in Scotland set the scene for it, and must be reversed. The quality of the elections varies widely, but a formal voting age of 18 is very nearly universal. Consider the huge difference in, say, drinking ages, or ages of marriage. Yet the world looks at the question of when to allow people to vote, and overwhelmingly it concludes that, while these things were always going to be arbitrary, 18 would do.

The only notable exception has been the election of two of the last four Prime Ministers of the United Kingdom. There is no minimum age to join the Conservative Party, and even if anyone were checking, then voting rights would officially kick in at the age of 15. Like foreign nationals, overseas residents, and incarcerated convicts, 15-year-olds have officially, and younger children have no doubt unofficially, voted for two of the last four Prime Ministers, who have taken office immediately upon having been declared elected Party Leader while Parliament was not even sitting. If you are going to let the very young exercise that kind of power, then why not let them do anything else?

We give the citizens of the Commonwealth’s other member states the right to vote and stand in elections to our Parliament, but very few of those countries reciprocate; two of the last six Prime Ministers of Australia have had to give up their natal British citizenship in order to sit in the Australian Parliament. The present system enfranchises Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, but not Americans or Israelis. Is that what those who write above the line in the Daily Telegraph want? It says that Ghanaians are more “like us” than Germans are, and that Swazis are more “like us” than Swedes are. Is that what those who write below the line in the Daily Mail want? 

Countries join and leave the Commonwealth quite frequently. None of them has any more recent connection to Britain that any member of the European Economic Area has. By any measure, many have less. Some fairly recent additions to the Commonwealth have no more connection to Britain than anywhere else in the world has. Although no less, either. Britain’s superdiversity uniquely combines having people from every inhabited territory on Earth, having some level of ethnic diversity down to every neighbourhood and village, and having a huge and exponentially increasing mixed-race population in the society that accepted mixed-race people and couples more than anywhere else.

Either parliamentary candidates should have to be British citizens in Great Britain, or British or Irish citizens in Northern Ireland, but there would be no nationality requirement for voting. Or there should simply be no nationality requirement either to vote or to stand. Either would do, but it does have to be one or the other. Instead, though, the European Union is overwhelmingly white, and it is only EU citizens whom it is proposed to enfranchise. But beware of tying the franchise to the payment of income tax. 42 per cent of adults have incomes that do not reach that threshold. No, not “before benefits”. Those are taxable income. Two in five adults have gross incomes, from all sources, of less of than one thousand pounds per month. If that does not sound like the Britain that you know, then you need to get out more. And if a Polish full-time cleaner could not vote because her income was too low for the taxman, then why should a British full-time cleaner be able to vote? So it would begin. So it is already beginning.