Keeping Things Civil

The Midlands Industrial Council sounds like a most admirable body (even if it is daft enough to waste its money on the Tories), just as the trade unions are (even if they are daft enough to waste their money on the Labour Party). Between them, they seem to supply the last clean money left in British politics, which is why Red New Labour wants rid of the former while Red and Blue New Labour alike want rid of the latter. After all, they are examples of a little thing called civil society, which we cannot allow anywhere near politics. Can we? And the shortfall arising from the “transition” to civil society’s exclusion from politics must be made good by the taxpayer. Mustn’t it?

The Unfolding Story

A most unusual email this afternoon from a very senior Labour figure indeed, whose path mine happens to have crossed from time to time.

I am very bad for letting the Great Unwashed into the secret that Tony Blair and John Smith despised each other, indeed so badly that Blair had been planning to leave Parliament until Smith died. But my real crime is to suggest that, in the event of a war against Iran, we should stop pretending to have Armed Forces of our own, and instead conscript our least accomplished 16-year-old boys directly into the Israeli Defence Force. Apparently, “if the wrong people read that, then it will happen.”

I have had a telephone conversation with this correspondent, and I can assure you that no humour was intended. Recent and ongoing events have begun to reveal just how central Israel has always been to New Labour, and above all to the funding of New Labour. This was not, and is not, about Israeli interference in Britain. Rather, it was, and is, about using Britain as a lever in favour of hardline opinion in Israel, regardless of the views of the people who actually live there. And the means of doing this has been, and remains, cold, hard cash.

Even as much as (and, indeed, closely connected to) the roots of New Labour on the sectarian, Marxist, Labour-hating Left, this is the great untold story of British politics over the last twenty years, a story still being played out across what are now all three New Labour parties.

Class Presidents

You really would have thought that the last Presidential Election, which could quite feasibly have been that of a Holy Roman Emperor, would have killed off, once and for all, the myth of “classless” America. But apparently not. As Martin Meenagh points out, all the media’s favourite candidates are the sons or the daughter of privilege, while all those whom the media love to hate have humble backgrounds, apart from Obama, and at least he has paid his dues.

But Why Are They In Any Danger?

The Lords of the Blogosphere are still trying to enforce their party line over the Iraqi “translators”. As Neil Clark asks, if the “liberation” of Iraq is so popular, then why are they in any danger at all? Why are they not being lauded as heroes by the Iraqi people?

World AIDS Day

Abstain from extramarital sexual activity, and from non-medical intravenous drug use. Who, exactly, is incapable of this, and why, exactly? Women? Black people? Poor people? Developing world people? Or just poor black women in the developing world? I think we should be told.

The Edward Stourton Show

I used to think that Jonathan Dimbleby was bad for dominating Any Questions. But then I heard his stand-in, Edward Stourton. Why do the panellists even bother to turn up?

Why Do You Care?

I couldn't care less whether David Cameron or Gordon Brown won the next Election, if that is the "choice" on offer. It is to that "choice" that I object. Why do you care? Why, specifically, in philosophical and policy terms? There is no reason to. And that is the problem.