The Road Ahead

Keir Starmer inspires righteous revulsion when he claims that his proudest achievement was the lifting of the two-child benefit cap, which finally happened two years after he had withdrawn the whip from seven MPs because they had voted for nothing more than such an amendment to the Humble Address, and when that amendment had been defeated, then they had voted with the Government.

But when Starmer suggests that the Labour victories of 1945, 1997 and 2024 had been the only three ever, then he does not mean anything by it. He is just ignorant. Although, if anything, that is even worse. So much for all those years on the Executive Committee of the Fabian Society, which published his epoch-making 2021 programme, The Road Ahead. No, nor have I. And no, nor will I.

I always laugh when Hard Rightists go off about the Fabians. They cannot possibly have met any. It is not to that source that we must trace Andy Burnham's desire to ban Virtual Private Networks, or the present Government's plan to force YouTube to promote its trusted news sources, which if they had any self-respect would be affronted at the suggestion that they were trusted by the Government.

If YouTube and other such sites promoted the BBC, then should you not have to pay the licence fee to access them, with no escape since you could not have a VPN? If Twitter is so bad that Lisa Nandy, a close ally and a constituency neighbour of Burnham's, has to withdraw from it not only herself but also her Department of State, the one responsible for media regulation, then why not ban it altogether? Watch those spaces. You will soon be able to watch little or nothing else. Otherwise you might realise that, for example, what was presently going on in Iran was not merely an obsequy comparable to that of Ms Diana Spencer, but very probably the largest gathering in human history. There was never going to be a counterrevolution in Iran.

The European Court of Justice has just outlawed even private, non-commercial reproduction of any content, even football scores or weather reports, from RT or Sputnik, and this is one of the many areas in which Britain has never really quite left the EU. Off our own bat, we are enacting the National Security (State Threats) Bill, which would imprison journalists who had so much as reported figures published by countries on the naughty step, possibly including even the China that we allowed to buy pretty much anything it wanted, even schools. And we are set to hand over a major piece of our cultural infrastructure to the foreign behemoth that is Comcast. Talk about a satellite state.

Yet even Nigel Farage now demands adherence to "Leveson", and the rest of the Right sold the pass when it gave the Government the power to decide who might or might not own a newspaper, a power that the present Government has used because that is how it goes: eventually, the other lot gets back in, exercising the powers that you had taken for yourselves. But since we are here. Only £1.6 billion for ITV's "broadcasting and streaming arm"? The split between that and "ITV Studios" has turned out as well as the NHS internal market, or the split between fiscal policy and monetary policy, or the split between the Royal Mail and the Post Office, or the split between the trains and the track. The one that we can never have is the one that we desperately need, between investment banking and retail banking. But since we are here, it is beholden on the Government to keep free-to-air at least everything that was made by ITV Studios, and to save ITN. Of course, if the rules about impartiality truly existed, then there would be no need to prevent ITN's synergy into Sky News. But since we are here.