Loadasmoney, Indeed

None of this is controversial to anyone other than saloon bar economists and the tabloid hacks who pander to them despite knowing that they are illiterate.

Instead, warmly welcome the billion pound investment in jobs and services in Northern Ireland, and call for Scotland, Wales, and each of the nine English regions to receive the same per capita. Anything less would make a mockery of the very names of the Conservative and Unionist Party, and of the Democratic Unionist Party.

The DUP has never disputed the existence of the so-called Magic Money Tree. At least in practice, that existence is now fully acknowledged by the Conservative Party as well. Let the abundant fruits of that Tree be harvested throughout the United Kingdom.

Quite apart from the sheer gall of a government with the economic record of this one, the term "Magic Money Tree" deliberately has the same initials as "Modern Monetary Theory", on which see here (PDF).

Those who have turned the former into a catchphrase are terrified that most people, including most politicians across the spectrum, might realise that money itself exists by State action in the first instance, that the State does not need to tax or borrow anything before spending it (no economist disputes that, as phrased), that it is actually impossible for a sovereign state to run out of its own free-floating fiat currency, that there is no resemblance of any kind between the budget of such a state and the budget of a household, and that the tools are readily at hand to counteract any inflationary effect of the obvious political applications of these realisations.

The people who do not want these things to be acted upon, or even to be generally known, have political objections to the intended consequences, and they have social and cultural reasons for those objections. That is fine. That is a debate to be had. Our reasons for wanting those consequences are also political, and the roots of those reasons are also social and cultural.

But that is what ours are, and that is what theirs are. Screaming about "the Magic Money Tree", and presenting their own politically preferable economic arrangements as if they were the Laws of Physics, is an approach that deserves derision, and wholesale exclusion from adult company.

To turn to Jared O'Mara himself, he is the MP for Sheffield Hallam. If the Conservatives cannot win there, where they always used to win until Nick Clegg came along, then they are doomed to become a peculiarity of the Home Counties, never again to govern alone.

O'Mara is usually cited as Momentum's first MP. The Labour Party, as such, had no interest in getting him into Parliament, and no aspiration to take Sheffield Hallam, which is one of the richest constituencies in the country and which had never previously returned a Labour candidate. But the Left within and beyond the Labour Party piled in independently, and the rest is history.

Yes, the Conservatives won an overall majority without that seat in 2015. But this is not 2015. When Labour, the Labour Left, a Labour Left candidate without any official party backing in practice, can win Sheffield Hallam, then the Conservatives are simply screwed in the North, where they have to win seats in order to govern alone. The changes are now very rapid indeed.

Hunted Fox

Someone needs to tell Liam Fox that you can only be blackmailed from a position of weakness.

Cynical and Manipulative

Anti-Semitism is "weaponised in a cynical and manipulative way" against Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters, complained Chris Williamson. He was quoting what Jewish members of the Labour Party had publicly said.

The reaction against him has proved his point. That reaction has been, and it is, the cynical and manipulative weaponisation of anti-Semitism against Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters.

Incumbent, Irrelevant

This has never happened before.

We have an incumbent Prime Minister who is completely irrelevant. No one would dream of asking her view on any subject whatever.

Jess Phillips has been an Opposition MP for barely over two years, including less than a year as a Parliamentary Private Secretary.

Laura Pidcock has been in Parliament, entirely as an Opposition backbencher, for less than three months, during which the House of Commons has barely sat.

Yet the opinion of either of them is given more weight (which is to say, any weight at all) than that of Theresa May, who purports to be the Prime Minister.

This is certainly without precedent, and probably without parallel.

Suspend Your Disbelief

The suspension of nine G4S staff for abuse at an immigration centre.

The fact that profit margins at the big six energy providers have hit the highest level on record while prices soar.

The continued failure or refusal to provide some communities and households with superfast broadband.

Yet we are still being told that privatisation is the solution.

It could not be more obvious that privatisation is the problem.

Where Are The Sanctions?

The UN has condemned the United Kingdom for its abuse of the human rights of the disabled, of whom I am one.

So, where are the sanctions?

And Jess Phillips MP has stated that British Pakistanis imported wives for their disabled sons.

Again, whether from the House of Commons or from the Labour Party, where are the sanctions?

My expulsion from the Labour Party was for an arcane reason, it has been in force for as long as the present MP for this seat has been old enough to vote, and it has been the best thing that has ever happened in my political life.

But I never did anything as bad as Phillips has done.

Nor did I do anything as bad, although it was a variation on the same theme, as Tony Blair has now been doing for quite some time with complete impunity.

Where are the sanctions?

Dieu Defend Le Droit

I have just remembered that some years ago, work along the bypass in Lanchester revealed a memorial plaque to the former Princess Diana. Soon after her death, it had been erected by the Parish Council, which still had many of the same members. Yet no one could remember its ever having existed.

Anyway, what is the monarchy for? Well, it binds to the modern or postmodern State people who might otherwise experience various degrees of estrangement from it. Thus, the pioneering social democracies have been in the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand, Scandinavia and the Benelux countries, with institutions such as the National Health Service enjoying more or less universal support even among the downright reactionary.

In death, however, Diana has had the role of binding to the State, through the monarchy, a very different category. Those are the people defined by the social revolution since the 1960s, the economic revolution since the 1980s, and the constitutional revolution since the year of her demise. The people most likely to regard the monarchy as pressingly irrelevant or offensive.

And why would Diana not serve that purpose? The Spencers are one of the great Whig dynasties. They played no small part in engineering the accession of the present Royal line, and they bankrolled its indigence for much of the eighteenth century.

Now, not dissimilarly, the allegiance of a sufficiently large and vocal section of society is conditional on the great expectations of Diana's son and grandson. What matters to those people is that William V and George VII are the coming kings of Dianese descent. Some of them even demand, although they will always do so in vain, that a generation be skipped, so that Diana's heir might ascend the Throne immediately upon its next becoming vacant.

That is a kind of Whig Jacobitism. But it has probably secured the monarchy well into the twenty-second century. And with it, the support of even the downright reactionary for the social democracy of the modern or postmodern State.