Zarah Sultana should have been told that while she was welcome to be involved in Your Party, direction would be set by MPs who had not been elected on the Labour ticket, but had in fact already beaten the Labour machine, thereby proving their mettle.
Nigel Farage and Ben Habib should both take note. For example, imagine a seamless progression from Director of Research at the Centre for Policy Studies, through advising the Conservative Party's Policy Unit, writing Iain Duncan Smith's Conference speech that lost IDS his job a few weeks later, being Chief Leader Writer of the Daily Telegraph, having to be dropped as the Conservative candidate against Tony Blair at Sedgefield in 2005, writing David Cameron's hug-a-hoodie speech, serving as Political Secretary to Boris Johnson, being parachuted into a safe seat with a view to resigning it if Johnson had lost the majority that he had already halved, managing Robert Jenrick's Leadership campaign, and holding Shadow Ministerial office under Kemi Badenoch, all without ever having been a Minister.
Should the final stage to date be heading Reform UK's Department for Preparing for Government? Having served his time under Cameron, Danny Kruger was Political Secretary to the Prime Minister of Stonewall and of the entirely correct identification of Margaret Thatcher as the pioneer of Net Zero, the capo of the crew that is taking over Reform with Farage's full support. That said, although Sarah Pochin has been married to the same man since 1996, Kruger is now the only sitting Reform MP to be married to his first and only wife. Lee Anderson is a remarried divorcee, Richard Tice is a divorced cohabitee, and Farage is a twice-divorced cohabitee. It is Rupert Lowe and James McMurdock who live with their only wives. If Kruger is a natalist, then why did he not vote to lift the two-child benefit cap? While that is the policy of his new party, he can in general expect as much success for his socially conservative views in that as he had in his last one. Farage has already come out in favour of transwomen in women's prisons.
By contrast, Jeremy Corbyn as Leader of the Labour Party was surrounded by true believers in biological sex and in its importance, with Laura Pidcock still flying the flag to this day. In 2019, the Greens took more votes at North West Durham than Richard Holden's margin of victory. Corbyn has clearly chosen four such true believers over Sultana. The Green Party may be joined here.
Some of us don't want to join a liberal middle class, pro-EU, pro-NATO party.
ReplyDeleteThe Greens were in Government in Scotland: they sold public assets, privatised woodlands and cut public services that our communities rely on.
800k people want a working class socialist alternative.
Join the Workers Party. I shall not be joining that or anything else. But you should.
DeleteGeorge Galloway is a thrice-remarried divorcee.
DeleteThen Danny Kruger should have no problem with the Workers Party, which, moreover is already natalist and does not support biologically male prisoners in women's prisons.
DeleteOr drug legalisation, come to that. Richard Tice wants to legalise cannabis, Nigel Farage wants to legalise drugs across the board, and Lee Anderson signed a select committee report in that direction in 2023. Mind you, Kruger served happily under David Cameron and Boris Johnson. In their immediate circles, in fact.
One reading of this is that there’s a generational problem on the English left — we have got good at building institutions that cannot produce a new leadership outside of the existing ranks of those formed in the 60s and 70s. Greens, to their credit, seem to have solved it.
ReplyDeleteBut 700,000 people signing up, 15% in the polls before the party even had a name — this had, still has, the potential to make a broader impact than the Greens could. This is a criminal waste of an opportunity. They have to back up from their current trajectories, now.
But they won't.
DeleteBut it was Laura Pidcock who told Chris Williamson to stop attending the Socialist Campaign Group.
ReplyDeleteThey were wild times. And they look as if they are coming back.
DeleteRighties go on about Left/Islamist alliances but they are quite coherent compared with either the Tories or Reform. What did Kruger have in common with most other Tories, what does he have in common with any other Reform MP?
ReplyDeleteAs will become apparent soon enough.
DeleteWhere did it all go wrong?
ReplyDeleteWhen Sultana announced her new party, then the rest of them should have said that that was her business, and nothing to do with them. Especially, Corbyn should have said that.
Delete