Oliver Kamm Is Making Me Cross

Oliver Kamm, or whatever you are now calling yourself, I do not know how many times I have to tell you this. Your emails are deleted unopened.

Sadly, I assume that I would have to open them in order to block you. But go away and get back to editing Wikipedia obsessively under an assumed name, you funny little man.

Neil Clark's fundraising page in order to take you to court is here.

The Choice Is Simple

Larry Elliott writes:

Modern Britain has been shaped by two events: the banking crisis of 2008 and the Brexit vote eight years later. 

The reason Boris Johnson is sitting in No 10 is that the Conservatives have learned the right lessons from these episodes and Labour has not. 

The Tories have understood that their response to the financial meltdown – a prolonged period of austerity that squeezed living standards – was unpopular and wrong. 

They also twigged that Brexit was a revolt against austerity and free-market economics more generally – so they have embraced the decision to leave the European Union and positioned themselves as the party of intervention and the working classes. 

Labour got the first part of this narrative but not the second. In this general election it sought to divorce austerity from Brexit – with disastrous results. 

Labour won seats in 2017 when it said it would respect the referendum result, but saw its “red wall” breached when it moved steadily closer to remain. 

Having chosen not to listen to what voters in its former heartlands were saying, Labour now seems bemused to find that they have migrated to a party that did. 

Labour’s Brexit stance was not the only reason it lost the election. The number of seats won by the party has fallen, with one exception, at every election since 1997. 

Corbyn bucked the trend in 2017 and although he only managed to emulate Gordon Brown’s performance in the defeat of 2010, there was hope that Labour could avoid becoming as politically irrelevant as the social democratic parties in Germany and France. 

But to do so Labour had to keep its broad electoral coalition together. The problem in doing so became evident as the campaign wore on. 

Voters in the former industrial parts of the country are not mugs. They could see that Labour’s stance on Brexit had moved from respecting the referendum result in 2016, to telling the public to have another think (and to come up with a different result) in 2019. 

And when canvassing returns showed the likely loss of seats in the red wall, Labour made matters worse by coming up with a string of panicky, and expensive, electoral bribes. 

To many voters, these seemed an insult to their intelligence, which indeed they were. All of which leaves Labour in a terrible place. 

It is not just that the Conservatives are in power for at least the next five years. It is not even that seats once thought impregnable have been lost. 

It is the failure – for a second time in a decade – to be able to exploit conditions that looked tailor-made for a party of the left. 

The financial crisis marked a watershed for global economic liberalism, because its fundamental tenet – that markets worked best when governments took a back seat – came under scrutiny. 

Brexit was one of the ways in which the pushback against the orthodoxy manifested itself, but much of the remainer left in the UK has been unable to grasp this. 

Instead of seeing Brexit as a vote for a different sort of economy, it has demonised leave voters as nativists and racists. It decided early on that no matter what form Brexit took, it would be worse than the status quo. 

This was a curious argument, because it presupposed that nothing ever changes: that there would be no new policies, no attempts to improve on what currently exists, no attempts to respond to any short-term problems that Brexit might cause. 

By this token, Labour’s national investment bank and its Keynesian infrastructure programme would have made no difference either. 

Brexit has already been a catalyst for change. It has forced the government to spend rather than cut. 

The Conservatives are committed to increase both the minimum wage and have pledged to use the money saved by scrapping a planned reduction in corporation tax to spending on the NHS.

The need for state intervention in the economy is now accepted: regional policy is back in vogue. So Labour’s remainers face a choice. 

Option one is to move straight from supporting a second referendum to arguing for rejoining the EU. 

This is an entirely negative strategy and relies on UK voters looking at the dismal growth across the Channel and saying: “We want what they are having.” It seems a tad unlikely.

Option two involves grudgingly accepting that Brexit is a reality and that Labour’s approach should be to make the best of a bad job. 

This would be a continuation of Corbyn’s triangulation strategy and have the same baleful result. 

The message sent to leave voters would be the same as it has been consistently from remainers since 2016: you got it wrong, you idiots. This doesn’t seem to be a particularly good way of rebuilding the red wall either. 

Strategy three is the hardest for remainers to swallow but it is the only option that offers a way back for Labour: embrace Brexit and argue for a left version of Britain outside the EU. 

This could take many forms: a devolution of power to local mayors; a new deal for the north; state support for green industry that would provide well-paid jobs in every constituency. 

It means exuding optimism that things can get better rather than telling people who are struggling, but not destitute, that only state handouts can alleviate their misery.

The choice is simple: start putting together a post-Brexit progressive project or have a monster sulk and watch the Tories make the political weather. 

I will be standing for Parliament again here at North West Durham next time, so please give generously. In any event, please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

Defending Our TERF

It would be impossible to plan the National Health Service at any level if we had no idea who was a man and who was a woman at any given time. Likewise, it would be impossible to compensate the WASPI women, for which the money will have been set aside in anticipation of the loss of the court case.

That money will still be sitting there. Boris Johnson, Sajid Javid and Thérèse Coffey could pay it all out in the New Year, or certainly at the turn of the financial year. But only if they knew who was a woman and who was not.

I proudly repeat the words of Maya Forstater: "Sex is a biological fact, and is immutable. There are two sexes, male and female. Men and boys are male. Women and girls are female. It is impossible to change sex. These were until very recently understood as basic facts of life by almost everyone." Do your worst.

If a scientific fact as basic and as obvious as biological sex can be denied, then so can any other scientific fact, to the ruin of human progress. It is contrary both to the whole history of human experience, and to the plain facts of biological science, to suggest either that sexual orientation is fixed, or that "gender" is "fluid".

I will be standing for Parliament again here at North West Durham next time, so please give generously. In any event, please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

Purely Medicinal?

We must be on our guard. Any medicinal properties of cannabis are no more applied by smoking a spliff than those of opium would be by injecting heroin, or than those of aspirin would be by ingesting bark. Cannabis is linked to violent psychosis.

We need a single category of illegal drug, with a crackdown on the possession of drugs, including a mandatory sentence of three months for a second offence, six months for a third offence, one year for a fourth offence, and so on. 

We also need to restore the specific criminal offence of allowing one's premises to be used for illegal drug purposes, and we need Peter Hitchens's The War We Never Fought to be taught in schools.

Radical change would be impossible if the workers, the youth and the poor were in a state of stupefaction, and that baleful situation, which has been contrived in the past, is being contrived again today.

I will be standing for Parliament again here at North West Durham next time, so please give generously. In any event, please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

A Call To Arms

As Cobham is flogged off, with the announcement on the Friday before Christmas in the hope that nobody would notice, Lady Cobham is entirely right that this would not be allowed to happen in any other advanced country.

The case is further strengthened for a publicly owned monopoly supplier of arms to our own Armed Forces, with a total ban on arms sales abroad, and with heavy State investment in the diversification of the existing skills base in the arms industry. It must be said that that industry has vastly more political clout than its real economic importance would warrant, but even so.

Boris Johnson is in Estonia, where we station troops as a kind of tripwire because under no other circumstance would Britain fight a war to defend places in Eastern Europe of which many people here had never heard and which very few could identify on a map.

An attack on those countries would have to involve shooting at our own troops. So we put our troops there in order to be shot at. Following the recent family-reunion-from-hell of an excuse for a NATO seventieth birthday bash, the case for getting the hell out of NATO is now plain for all to see.

It is of course Donald Trump who calls NATO "obsolete". He has had some success in securing a prisoner exchange with Iran. Johnson could cut the ground from under Keir Starmer and Jess Phillips by offering to release Julian Assange, as demanded by the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, if Iran also released Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, as demanded by the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention.

Beyond that, we have no quarrel with Iran, but plenty with Saudi Arabia, which we arm and for which we fight wars, yet which inspires, directs and funds terrorism right here on our own streets. Prince Turki al Faisal or anybody else who might wish to drag us into any other war for Saudi Arabia, much less a war with Iran, must be told in no uncertain terms to get lost.

And what of the United States Space Force? It is not necessarily unwelcome in principle. It will do important work in research and development, work such as probably only the United States could do, or at least coordinate.

But space is being militarised, and that by the country that does not recognise it as a common resource for all humanity. There needs to be a call for the Republican Party to return to President Eisenhower's proposal, in a speech to the United Nations General Assembly on 22nd September 1960, for the principles of the Antarctic Treaty to be extended to Outer Space.

I will be standing for Parliament again here at North West Durham next time, so please give generously. In any event, please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

Councillor Watch: Day 159

I hereby invite all Labour members of Durham County Council who believe me to be guilty of the criminal charges against me to email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com and say so.

I would not be able to reply to those emails, but every day the names of those who had sent them to me would appear here. So far, I have received none.

Born of a Virgin

Long before anyone knew anything about X and Y chromosomes, the Church Fathers held that God had made up whatever had been lacking in order to make it possible for a woman to bear a male child without any male human involvement. The view that miracles are absolutely impossible is not compatible with agnosticism. Nor with science, which is purely descriptive. What if a miracle did occur?

Forget the assertion that until the nineteenth century, people thought that heredity was purely on the paternal side. The Greek urban, homosocial leisure class thought that. But the Hebrew writers seem to have been unaware that any such fantasy even existed. Well, of course they were. They were working farmers who spent their time with their wives and children. Accordingly, their purity and incest laws presuppose a biological relationship with both parents. I employ the present tense because those laws are still in daily use, and may be read in the best-selling book in the world.

There is an old stand-by of middlebrow, pub bore professional atheism, that the Virginal Conception has numerous mythological parallels. Nothing could be further from the case. What occurs over and over again in mythology is the impregnation, by otherwise normal sexual means, of a woman by a god; a god, therefore, with a physical body. Exactly that does not happen in the Gospels.

However, it is held in Mormonism that this was how Jesus was conceived, one among many reasons why the enormous popularity of the Mormons within American religion – numerically third only to the Catholics and to the Southern Baptists, and the clear direct or indirect originators of numerous ideas such as "Manifest Destiny" – raises very serious questions about whether the American Republic, as such, is any sort of bulwark of Christianity. Not unanswerable questions. But very serious ones.

Both Jews and pagans made all sorts of contrary claims, but one was completely unknown to either, namely that Jesus had been the natural child of Mary and Joseph. No such suggestion was ever made by anyone in the first eighteen centuries of Christianity's existence. Even the Qur'an has the "Prophet Isa" born of the "Virgin Mariam". Apart from that partial retelling in the Qur'an, the Biblical account is unique, and could not be less like any of the parallels that are routinely alleged. 

That Islam – a Semitic reaction against the recapitulation in Christ and His Church of all three of the Old Israel, Hellenism, and the Roman Empire – depicts Jesus as both virgin-born, and the Messiah foretold by the Hebrew prophets, is an important insight into the debate as to whether or not the circumstances of His conception described in the New Testament really are the fulfilment of Old Testament prophecy.

Of course, had there been no expectation that the Messiah would be virgin-born, then there would have been no reason for the Evangelists to have invented it. And that would have been just as strong an argument in the doctrine's favour. But the Islamic view, staunchly Semitic and anti-Hellenistic as it is, adds considerable weight to the belief that the Virgin Birth is, as the New Testament writers maintain entirely matter-of-factly that it is, the fulfilment of the words of the Old Testament prophets.

It is often contended that it is not clear that the prophecy in Isaiah actually refers to a virgin. Well, it certainly does in the Septuagint, the translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek, and, contrary to what used to be asserted, first century Palestine is now acknowledged to have been profoundly Hellenised. So either the Septuagint prophecy is indeed being fulfilled explicitly, or else there was no expectation that the Messiah would be virgin-born, and thus no reason to make up that Jesus had been. The doctrine works either way.

Happy Holidays?

Hanukkah is a strange one. After the emergence of Judaism, set out below, Hanukkah was historically a very minor festival until almost into living memory, and in much of the Jewish world it still is. But it does provide an opportunity to preempt this year’s round of lazy claims that Christmas is a taking over of some pagan winter festival. 

There is of course a universal need for winter festivals. But the dating of Christmas derives from Hanukkah, not from the pagan Saturnalia or anything else. No British or Irish Christmas custom derives from paganism. There is little, if any, fokloric pagan continuation in these islands, and little, if anything, is known about pre-Christian religion here. Most, if not all, allegations to the contrary derive from Protestant polemic against practices originating in the Middle Ages, and usually the Late Middle Ages at that. The modern religion known as Paganism is an invention from scratch, the very earliest roots of which are in the late nineteenth century. 

Furthermore, the dating of Christmas from that of Hanukkah raises serious questions for Protestants, who mistakenly exclude the two Books of Maccabees from the Canon because, along with various other works, they were allegedly not considered canonical at the time of Jesus and the Apostles.

But in fact, the rabbis only excluded those books specifically because they were likely to lead people into Christianity, and they are repeatedly quoted or cited in the New Testament, as they were by Jewish writers up to their rabbinical exclusion. Even thereafter, a point is made by the continued celebration of Hanukkah, a celebration thanks to books to which Jews only really had access because Christians had preserved them, since the rabbis had wanted them destroyed.

Indeed, far from being the mother-religion that it is often assumed to be, a very great deal of Judaism is actually a reaction against Christianity, although this is by no means the entirety of the relationship, with key aspects of kabbalah in fact deriving from Christianity, with numerous other examples set out in Rabbi Michael Hilton’s The Christian Effect on Jewish Life (London: SCM Press, 1994), and so on.

Hanukkah bushes, and the giving and receiving of presents at Hanukkah, stand in a tradition of two-way interaction both as old as Christianity and about as old as anything that could reasonably be described as Judaism. As Rabbi Hilton puts it, “It is hardly surprising that Jewish communities living for centuries in Christian society should be influenced by the surrounding culture.” There are many, many, many other examples that could be cited.

These range from the Medieval adoption for Jewish funeral use of the Psalm numbered 23 in Jewish and Protestant editions; to the new centrality within Judaism that the rise of Christianity gave to Messianic expectations (the Sadducees, for example, had not believed in the Messiah at all) or to the purification of women after childbirth; to the identification in later parts of the Zohar of four senses of Scripture technically different from, but effectively very similar to, those of Catholicism; to Medieval rabbis’ explicit and unembarrassed use of Christian stories in their sermons.

Many a midrash – such as “to you the Sabbath is handed over, but you are not handed over to the Sabbath” – is easily late enough to be an example of the direct influence of Christianity, yet Jewish and Christian scholars alike tend to announce an unidentified common, usually Pharisaic, root, although they rarely go off on any wild goose chase to find that root. I think that we all know why not. 

But the real point is something far deeper, arising from the definition of the Jewish Canon in explicitly anti-Christian terms, and from the anti-Christian polemic in the Talmud. Judaism hardly uses the Hebrew Bible directly, rather than its own, defining and anti-Christian, commentaries on it and on each other. Jews doubting this should ask themselves when they last heard of an animal sacrifice, or which of their relatives was a polygamist. 

Judaism, I say again, is not some sort of mother-religion. Rather, I say again that it is a reaction against Christianity, and specifically, like Islam, a Semitic reaction against the recapitulation in Christ and His Church of all three of the Old Israel, Hellenism and the Roman Empire; there are also, of course, culturally European reactions against that recapitulation by reference to Classical sources, as there always have been, although they are increasingly allied to Islam.

Thus constructed, Judaism became, and remains, an organising principle, again like Classically-based reactions, for all sorts of people discontented for whatever reason with the rise of Christianity in general and with the Christianisation of the Roman Empire in particular, including all the historical consequences of that up to the present day, without any realistic suggestion of a common ethnic background.

Above all, Judaism’s unresolved Messianic hope and expectation has issued in all sorts of earthly utopianisms: Freudian, Marxist (and then Trotskyist, and then Shachtmanite), monetarist, Zionist, Straussian, neoconservative by reference to all of these, and so forth. They are all expressions of Judaism’s repudiation of Original Sin, Christianity’s great bulwark against the rationally and empirically falsifiable notions of inevitable historical progress and of the perfectibility of human nature in this life alone and by human efforts alone.

It is Christianity that refers constantly to the Biblical text. It is Christianity in general, and Catholicism in particular, that has a Temple, Jesus Christ, Who prophesied both the destruction of the Temple and its replacement in His own Person. It is Christianity in general, and Catholicism in particular, that has a Priesthood. It is Christianity in general, and Catholicism in particular, that has a Sacrifice, the Mass.

And it is Christianity in general, and Catholicism in particular, that is the religion of the Hebrew Scriptures. Including the two Books of Maccabees, the origin of Hanukkah. The true form of which, as of so much else, is Christmas.

The Man Who Was Thursday, On The Man Who Invented Christmas

It is almost impossible to overstate the cultural impact of A Christmas Carol. All adaptations, even by the Muppets, stick closely to the plot, and usually even to the dialogue. A green Bob Cratchit is not contrary to the book, in which no colour is specified.

In The Catholic Revival in English Literature, 1845-1961, Fr Ian Ker of Oxford proposes “a new way of looking at Chesterton’s literary achievement which has gone by default.” He sees the author of the Father Brown stories, and even of The Man Who Was Thursday, as “a fairly slight figure”. But Chesterton the non-fiction writer is “a successor of the great Victorian “sages” or “prophets”, who was indeed compared to Dr Johnson in his own lifetime, and who can be mentioned without exaggeration in the same breath as Carlyle, Ruskin, Arnold and especially, of course, Newman.”

Fr Ker identifies Charles Dickens (1906) both as Chesterton’s best work and as the key to understanding his Catholicism. “It is a typically Chestertonian paradox that while Dickens was nothing if not ignorant of and prejudiced against Catholicism as well as the Middle Ages, it is his unconsciously Catholic and Mediaeval ethos that is the heart of Chesterton’s critical study.”

First, Chesterton’s Dickens celebrated the ordinary, and rejoiced in sheer living and even sheer being. He was originally a “higher optimist” whose “joy is in inverse proportion to the grounds for so rejoicing,” because he simply “falls in love with” the universe, and “those love her with most intensity who love her with least cause.” Hence the exaggeration of Dickens’s caricatures, expressing both the heights of the highs and the depths of the lows in the life of one who looks at the world in this way.

For, secondly, Dickens created “holy fools”: Toots in Dombey and Son, Miss Podsnap in Our Mutual Friend, the Misses Pecksniff in Martin Chuzzlewit, to name but a few. Dickens also “created a personal devil in every one of his books,” figures with the “atrocious hilarity" of gargoyles. In either case, since the everyday world is so utterly extraordinary and extraordinary things so much a part of the everyday, so the absurd is utterly real and the real is utterly absurd. Postmodern, or what? Read Dickens, then read Chesterton on Dickens, and then re-read Dickens: who needs wilful French obscurantism in the name of ‘irony’?

And thirdly, then, Dickens was the true successor of Merry England, unlike his “pallid” contemporaries, the Pre-Raphaelites and “Gothicists”, whose “subtlety and sadness” was in fact “the spirit of the present day” after all. It was Dickens who “had the things of Chaucer”: "“the love of large jokes and long stories and brown ale and all the white roads of England”; “story within story, every man telling a tale”; and “something openly comic in men’s motley trades”.

Dickens’s defence of Christmas was therefore a fight “for the old European festival, Pagan and Christian”, i.e., for “that trinity of eating, drinking and praying that to moderns appears irreverent”, unused as the modern mind is to “the holy day which is really a holiday.” Dear reader, may you eat, drink and pray most merrily. As, indeed, will I.

Follow The Money

The problem is the Monetary Policy Committee itself. The surrender of democratic political control over monetary policy was New Labour's Original Sin, and must be reversed.

I will be standing for Parliament again here at North West Durham next time, so please give generously. In any event, please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

Indian Mutiny?

Narendra Modi effectively defines Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh as part of India, of the state of mind that is Bharat, but their Muslim majorities as not Indian and therefore as colonial occupiers or what have you, a view that cannot logically be held of the Muslims in certain parts of Bharat but not in the whole of it.

This is a perfectly normal expression of the political tradition in which he stands. That tradition, like at least half a dozen more, was at least as important to the struggle for Indian independence as Gandhi was, never mind our own Hollywood version of Gandhi, which is not very accurate at all, but which we insist on teaching in schools. Whether on film or in real life, Modi's lot assassinated Gandhi.

Of academic interest in Britain, you may say. But would that it were. Those of Modi's mind are such an important vote bank for the Conservative Party that they already hold three Cabinet positions, including that of Home Secretary.

I will be standing for Parliament again here at North West Durham next time, so please give generously. In any event, please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

Will You Listen Now?

A year later, as it turns out that as many Far Rightists as Islamists are now referred under Prevent, and then more of the former than of the latter are now sent up to the next stage, I am reproducing this here in the hope, however forlorn, that now you might listen. I accept that the part about the DUP is now academic, as is the part about Harriet Harman and the Speakership, but even so:

I have spent more than 20 years, since I was just about still in my teens and had never seen the Internet, trying to get the story out about Harriet Harman and the Paedophile Information Exchange. I have paid a terrible journalistic and political price for it, but I have no regrets.

Media that always knew about it simply ignored the whole thing, banning me from their websites and what have you, until a period of no more than two weeks when they needed to distract attention from Patrick Rock. Normal service was rapidly resumed, and it has continued ever since. No one has done more on this issue than I have. No one. And now, the plan is advancing to make Harman the next Speaker of the House of Commons. Not only would I oppose her election, but, were she already in post, then I would oppose her re-election at the start of the next Parliament. I have always been right about this, and I am now being proved right about something else as well.

We are enduring the rehabilitation of Toby Young, who is a eugenicist of international importance, who is also a self-confessed sexual assailant and supplier of Class A drugs, and whose involvement in eugenics has made him an associate of Emil Kirkegaard, himself an advocate of the rape of drugged children.

Like Kirkegaard, Young is a stalwart of the world of the London Conference on Intelligence, the Ulster Institute for Social Research, and the Mankind Quarterly. Yet he was given a loud voice in education policy for many years, a major formal role in education was about to have been given to him, and he is even now being brought back into public life. I was proved right about Harman, and I am being proved right again.

The Ulster Institute for Social Research and the Mankind Quarterly are based at the perfectly respectable University of Ulster, while the London Conference on Intelligence is held at the world class University College London. One of our most prestigious seats of higher learning has been hosting the propagation of eugenics, attended by the man whom the Government had wanted to put in charge of the entire sector.

No British university is giving houseroom to Holodomor Denial, which does do the rounds. If any were, then we would never hear the end of it. Nor should we. Yet in this age of Toby Young, would you bet that none was providing a platform for Holocaust Denial, and that no one with a key policy role was turning up? If you would, then you are a fool, and you richly deserve to be parted from your money.

As the latest developments in relation to National Action have made clear, and as I have been trying to tell people for years, the single biggest internal security threat comes from the Far Right. A Far Right that is enormous, longstanding, very highly organised, armed to the teeth, and possessed of the closest possible ties both to the DUP and to Conservative Party.

Sammy Wilson, who was then the DUP’s Press Officer and who is now one of its MPs, chaired the founding rally of Ulster Resistance, which has never disbanded or disarmed in any way. Ian Paisley (the Elder, so to speak), Peter Robinson and Ivan Foster all spoke at that rally. Emma Little-Pengelly, who is now the DUP MP for Belfast South, is the daughter of Noel Little of the Paris Three. She owed her election last year, for a somewhat improbable seat, to the concerted efforts of the local Loyalist paramilitary organisations, to whom she extended barely coded thanks in her acceptance speech. It is highly unusual for a married woman from her background to continue to use her maiden name, even in hyphenated form. But Noel Little’s daughter does so.

No Irish Republican organisation has murdered a Member of Parliament in the present century or in the preceding decade, and the people responsible are now such pillars of the British Establishment that they are entertained at Windsor Castle. No Islamist or Leftist organisation has ever murdered a Member of Parliament. But the Far Right has done so, only in 2016.

Thomas Mair, the murderer of Jo Cox, described himself to the Police as “a political activist”, and so he was. National Fronts come and BNPs go, EDLs come and Britain Firsts go, but certain institutional and organisational manifestations of the Far Right are perennial, hitherto even permanent. Mair’s is the Springbok Club, which is run by the people who also run the London Swinton Circle. And that, in turn, was addressed by Liam Fox (born 1961) and by Owen Paterson (born 1956) as recently as 2014. Ah, those old 1980s Tory Boys, in their Hang Mandela T-shirts and all the rest of it. Wherever did they all end up?

In the Thatcher and, to a lesser extent, Major years, there were Ministers who were members of the Western Goals Institute or the Monday Club, which latter had played a key role in securing British accession to the EU. Those crossed over, via such things as the fiercely Eurofederalist League of Saint George, to overt neo-Nazism on the Continent, to the Ku Klux Klan, to apartheid South Africa, to Ian Smith’s Rhodesia, to the juntas of Latin America, to Marcos and Suharto, to the Duvaliers, and so on. Nick Griffin’s father, Edgar, was a Vice-President of Iain Duncan Smith’s Leadership Campaign. He answered what was listed as one of its official telephone numbers (in his house) with the words “British National Party”. And now, we have Toby Young and the London Conference on Intelligence.

I tried to tell you.

I was right about Harriet Harman and the Paedophile Information Exchange. And I am right about this, too. Nor are they unconnected.

It has all come out about Margaret Thatcher’s friends. She knew about Cyril Smith when she arranged his knighthood. Jimmy Savile’s knighthood was rejected four times by the relevant committee, until she absolutely insisted upon it for the man with whom she spent every New Year’s Eve, and on whose programmes she was so obsessed with appearing that her staff had to ration those appearances. Her closest lieutenant was Peter Morrison.

Unlike the Prince of Wales, she would have had sight of every file on Laurens van der Post. What was so important about Smith, a highly eccentric and largely absentee MP for a tiny minority party? He was a Thatcherite avant la lettre, who had left the Labour Party when he had started to see cars outside council houses. Thatcher’s father was also a Liberal until all of that fell apart between the Wars, and he was never a member of the Conservative Party to his dying day. He, she and Smith were politically indistinguishable.

That the Radical Right put out pamphlets demanding the legalisation of paedophile activity was mentioned in Our Friends in the North, which was broadcast in 1996. Our Friends in the North is so integral to subsequent popular culture that one of its four stars is now James Bond, another was the first Doctor of this century’s revival of Doctor Who, and neither of the others is exactly obscure. That Thatcherite MPs were likely to commit sexual violence against boys with the full knowledge of the party hierarchy formed quite a major subplot in To Play the King, the middle series of the original House of Cards trilogy. To Play the King was broadcast as long ago as 1993. No politician or commentator of the generation that is now in or approaching its pomp could possibly have seen anything less than every minute of that trilogy.

Moreover, anyone who came to political maturity in what were then the newly-former mining areas will have been made fully aware that the miners in the dock, all the way back in 1984 and 1985, routinely made reference to the proclivities of the Home Secretary of the day, Leon Brittan. Those proclivities were common knowledge from Fife and the Lothians, to County Durham and the southern part of Northumberland, to South Yorkshire, to South Wales, among other places. Nothing was carried in the papers or included in the court reports, but the pit villages never needed Twitter in order to circumvent that kind of censorship.

Notably about Harriet Harman and the Paedophile Information Exchange, I have been here before: everyone called me a nutter for years, but I was right, I knew that I was right, so did they, and they now deny that they ever denied what I had been saying all along. Likewise, I have been trying for years to tell the world about the Far Right in this country, about its links to the 1980s New Right by which we are now governed, and about the links between both of those and paedophile advocacy, activism and activity. There it all is, at UCL and at the very heart of government. Will you listen now?

I will be standing for Parliament again here at North West Durham next time, so please give generously. In any event, please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

Beyond The Pale

And so the worthless Withdrawal Agreement passes, binding us to the level playing field provisions, and thus withdrawing us only from the decision-making process.

Boris "Two Articles" Johnson has put this in because he knows that it will lead to calls for reaccession. Expect them to begin at the start of February, if not before.

On this one, the Conservative Right still thinks that it has won, although it will be under no such delusion for very much longer. On everything else, though, it must know that it has been defeated. 

Jeremy Corbyn rightly called the Queen's Speech a pale imitation of the Labour manifesto, and woefully inadequate to its own task. But it confirmed his essential claim the he had won the argument.

The objections to such a programme in principle, rather than merely as going nowhere near far enough in practice, come from the right wings of the two parties. And nobody gives a damn what they think. 

As soon as the members have their say, then they will elect the most left-wing candidate available to be Leader of the Labour Party. 

And Johnson's priority is holding onto seats that can only be held by colossal levels of public spending, only not as colossal as those advocated by the other side.

Britain will soon become 1970s America, where Richard Nixon wanted to put up spending a lot, and Ted Kennedy wanted to put up spending a hell of a lot, so they had a meeting and agreed to split the difference. 

Nixon could then claim to have restrained Kennedy, and Kennedy could then claim to have forced Nixon's hand in the other direction.

Get used to this kind of thing. The key swing seats are not where they were a month ago, and they will not be so again for a very long time, if ever. We are the masters now.

I will be standing for Parliament again here at North West Durham next time, so please give generously. In any event, please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

Councillor Watch: Day 158

I hereby invite all Labour members of Durham County Council who believe me to be guilty of the criminal charges against me to email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com and say so.

I would not be able to reply to those emails, but every day the names of those who had sent them to me would appear here. So far, I have received none.

Impeach This

It is certainly not going to stop him from being reelected. So what, exactly, is the impeachment of Donald Trump going to achieve?

Whom will it feed? Whom will it house? Whom will it clothe? Whom will educate? Whose illness will it cure? Which illness will it prevent? Which war will it prevent? Which war will it end?

Even in its own terms, what on God's green earth is the Democratic Party for?

A Core Component

There can be up to nine candidates for Leader of the Labour Party. There will not be that many, and the Left will win once the members have their say. But I love the idea that Keir Starmer might defeat eight women.

All the usual suspects would then take to the airwaves to insist that, "Of course we would have loved to have had a woman Leader, but not this woman, or this woman, or this woman, or this woman, or this woman, or this woman, or this woman, or this woman."

Sir Keir, however, could preclude this by choosing to identify as a woman. After nine years of Conservative Government, you could then lose your job, with worse penalties to come very shortly indeed, if you did not recognise him as such.

I proudly repeat the words of Maya Forstater: "Sex is a biological fact, and is immutable. There are two sexes, male and female. Men and boys are male. Women and girls are female. It is impossible to change sex. These were until very recently understood as basic facts of life by almost everyone." Do your worst.

If a scientific fact as basic and as obvious as biological sex can be denied, then so can any other scientific fact, to the ruin of human progress. It is contrary both to the whole history of human experience, and to the plain facts of biological science, to suggest either that sexual orientation is fixed, or that "gender" is "fluid".

I will be standing for Parliament again here at North West Durham next time, so please give generously. In any event, please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

Prevent This

There are now as many referrals under the Prevent Strategy for Far Right extremism as there are for Islamist militancy. I have been warning about this for years. But you did not listen to me about the ties between New Labour and the Paedophile Information Exchange (in any practical sense, you still haven't), and you did not listen to me about this, either.

These were not and are not "lone wolves". These are tiny but very highly organised networks of neo-Nazis, well-funded and armed to the teeth. Via the Conservative Right since the Thatcher years, as well as via Ulster Resistance and thus the DUP, they have had links to the very heart of Government from 2010 onwards.

On 23rd September, which sticks in my mind because it was my birthday, I received the following through the post:

Dear Mr. Lindsay,

As the holder of a politically protected position within Durham County Council that makes it impossible for me to identify myself, it gives me great pleasure to inform you that the Council has finally referred you under the Prevent Strategy. Your extremist views on Brexit, economics, NATO, Trident, antisemitism, Julian Assange, abortion rights, transgender rights, the right to die, so-called “fathers’ rights”, Russia, China, Syria, Iran, Yemen, sexual offences, drugs, immigration, climate change, and a wide range of other issues have no place in our County. You are a professional misogynist, transphobe, antisemite, religious fundamentalist, ally of dictators and climate change denier who bases himself on the Left for recruitment purposes as a well-known radicaliser of young men and teenage boys. Some of us have been fighting for this referral for a very long time. The relevant authorities will be in touch. David Lindsay MP? David Lindsay in HMP, more like.

Well, they have not been in touch yet, but I greatly look forward to it. And I will be standing for Parliament again here at North West Durham next time, so please give generously. In any event, please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

Extreme Measures

The Queen's Speech announces legislation to prosecute anyone who spread what the Government decided was "extremism" or "disinformation" such as might assist a foreign power.

Therefore, I look forward to the prosecution of most Labour, almost all Conservative, and all Liberal Democrat MPs, as well as of everyone who still held what now amounted to the State's licence to call oneself a journalist.

Those people spread extremist disinformation in the service of the Saudi Arabia that inspires and directs terrorism on British soil, of its little helpers in the Gulf, of Israel (and mostly of the side that has lately been rejected by the electorate in Israel), and increasingly also of Narendra Modi's India and of the Fascist juntas that are being busily reinstalled across Latin America.

I will be standing for Parliament again here at North West Durham next time, so please give generously. In any event, please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

Identity Politics

As with the call for extensive boundary changes, it is a very strange thing for a newly elected Government, with a large parliamentary majority, to seem to suggest that its country suffered from widespread electoral fraud.

Having captured the Blyth, Don and Rother Valleys, the Conservatives now propose to reward their inhabitants by taking away their right to vote. The poor cannot afford to drive. They certainly cannot afford to travel when, even in full time work, they are struggling to eat, something about which the Queen's Speech does at least propose to take some action. Yet, or indeed therefore, here comes Jim Crow voter identification again.

Of course, behind all of this is the Home Office's solution in search of a problem since time immemorial, identity cards. Not for the first time, it is attempting to convince us that there exists a malady for this remedy already decided upon.

But electoral fraud is vanishingly rare in Britain, if it exists at all here. Across all elections held in 2015, when there were local elections and a General Election on the same day, there were 51.4 million votes cast. 

There were only 26 allegations of in-person electoral fraud. Twenty-six. And there were no convictions. Not one. Yet we became a different country on 3rd May last year, as people were denied their right to vote because they had failed to present their State papers. Guess which people.

Next up, naturally from The Guardian, we have already had a call for a variation on the literacy tests that the Southern United States used to employ in order to prevent blacks from voting. What next? The Jim Crow Poll Tax? Nor will it end there. Unless we stop this whole trend, right here and now.

The Blair Government loved identity cards, and most Labour MPs remain Blairite to the core. But I will be standing for Parliament again here at North West Durham next time, so please give generously. In any event, please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

Councillor Watch: Day 157

I hereby invite all Labour members of Durham County Council who believe me to be guilty of the criminal charges against me to email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com and say so.

I would not be able to reply to those emails, but every day the names of those who had sent them to me would appear here. So far, I have received none.

In Order To Hold

Boris Johnson was of course seeking to provoke a chorus of how unwelcome he would be when he suggested that he might attend the Durham Miners' Gala. But it is not an invitation-only or even a ticketed event. He should just turn up. Come on, Boris. I dare you.

In the meantime, you should follow up the restoration of the student nurse bursaries with the restoration of the Secretary of State for Health's responsibility for the health of citizens, a responsibility that was abolished by the infamous Health and Social Care Act 2012.

Then there is the mass homicidal Work Capability Assessment, which was introduced by the egregious Yvette Cooper, who with Keir Starmer was one of the two potential candidates for Labour Leader endorsed by the BBC on this morning's Today programme.

Cooper was not asked about her vicious, blood-drenched record at the Department for Work and Pensions. She never is. But put her on the spot by abolishing the WCA and forcing her to defend it. As for Starmer, cut the ground from under him by releasing Julian Assange, who has served his sentence for skipping bail, and the Swedish investigation into whom has been dropped.

This would be of a piece with your programme to keep onside, after Brexit, the areas that had delivered your overall majority. Tony Blair has been allowed out again, to demand that Labour oppose that programme from the Right.

Most Labour MPs agree with him that the failure to present a vision of permanent austerity at home and permanent war abroad, which is very much the vision of the EU, was what took Labour under Jeremy Corbyn from within two points of power in 2017 to the loss of North West Durham last week. Nothing to do with Brexit. Oh, no, of course not.

But Brexit is about to happen, leaving you with practically five years to fill in order to hold onto these seats. This is how to do it. And this is how to see off Cooper and Starmer before they even get started, along with the fact that Starmer, with Emily Thornberry, was of course the architect of Labour's disastrous Brexit policy.

As for the rest, Jess Phillips is easy, since she is both a racist and a man-hater, making her potentially a unifying figure between the voters that Labour held and the ones that it lost. Not, however, a unifying figure in Labour's favour. And you should offer some sort of role to Lisa Nandy, in the way that Gordon Brown gave one to Michael Ancram. Ancram continued to sit as a Conservative MP, and Nandy could continue to sit as a Labour MP.

I will be standing for Parliament again here at North West Durham next time, so please give generously. In any event, please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

Councillor Watch: Day 156

I hereby invite all Labour members of Durham County Council who believe me to be guilty of the criminal charges against me to email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com and say so.

I would not be able to reply to those emails, but every day the names of those who had sent them to me would appear here. So far, I have received none.

No, Overall Control

In May 2021, not only is Durham County Council going to go to No Overall Control, but a concerted effort could deprive Simon Henig of his own seat. Assuming, that is, that he was not already in prison by then for what he had done to me.

Anyway, the Leader of the Council is not going to be him, and ought not to be Labour at all. You see, every other Group, faction and tendency on that Council exists not to be his corrupt and incompetent right-wing Labour machine.

Labour will remain the largest party, but there would be no reason at all for it to retain the Leadership if everyone else could rally behind an alternative candidate. They ought already to be giving that the most serious consideration.

No Overall Control would have happened in 2017 on the issue of the Teaching Assistants, if it had not been for Ben Sellout. Whatever happened to the Teaching Assistants? But then, whatever has now happened to Ben Sellout?

I will be standing for Parliament again here at North West Durham next time, so please give generously. In any event, please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

Fighting To The End

Perhaps I spoke too soon? Having been vindicated over Douma, it also emerges that Chris Williamson has defeated the Labour Party in the High Court.

It must now pay all of his costs, which will help to establish a Left Legal Fighting Fund. We may yet see him back in Parliament.

Someone needs to make it clear that, if Jess Phillips were to become the Leader of the Labour Party, then he would contest her seat. 

And by someone, I mean, of course, George Galloway. He will be 70 in five years' time. But does anyone have a better suggestion?

I will be standing for Parliament again here at North West Durham next time, so please give generously. In any event, please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

Right Out

If the Left could get Rebecca Long-Bailey onto the ballot for Leader of the Labour Party, then she would win.

The final decision rests with the members in the country at large, and they will elect the most left-wing candidate on offer.

The MPs might then kick off again, but this will be a five year Parliament, giving their Constituency Labour Parties ample time in which to deselect them.

And where would they then go? They hate Boris Johnson viscerally, and they are well to the right of his economic programme, the purpose of which is to hold the Conservatives' 2019 gains and to add some neighbouring seats that his party narrowly failed to win this time.

That party is also sufficiently awash with Russian money for Johnson to be no Saudi puppet of the Blairites' dreams. Paid by both sides, he cannot attack either of them. In the cause of peace, that is a strategy of sorts. Although one side does continue to attack Britain, in Britain.

As for his own fiscally and militarily hawkish MPs, they, too, have nowhere else to go, and they, too, have more than enough grounds to fear local parties that are fan clubs of the Leader.

That is now the guiding principle of both parties: you can be as beastly as you like to the Right, because it has nowhere else to go.

Councillor Watch: Day 155

I hereby invite all Labour members of Durham County Council who believe me to be guilty of the criminal charges against me to email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com and say so.

I would not be able to reply to those emails, but every day the names of those who had sent them to me would appear here. So far, I have received none.

And The Government Shall Be Upon His Shoulder?

Sir Eric Pickles was pleased to announce a ban on BDS, a movement of which I am far from uncritical, in the King David Hotel, a building with a history that he presumably declined to mention.

Labour's submission to the IHRA Definition of Antisemitism means that it could not now resist the outright criminalisation of any such reference. Nor will it. Nor, already, does it in practice.

It is also now impossible for anyone to resist the criminalisation, which again is already in place in practice, of any reference to the continuous two thousand year Christian presence in the Holy Land, the presence that founded modern Palestinian national consciousness.

For 19 centuries, from the destruction of the Temple to the early Zionist settlements, the Land must be said to have been "Empty". Or the race relations legislation, which ought to have no application here, will be invoked in order to send you to prison.

Watch the Midnight Mass from Bethlehem this year, and think on that. Next year, it will probably not be shown in this country, for fear of imprisonment. And there will be nothing that the Labour Party will be able to say or do about that, because it has sold the pass.

But I will be standing for Parliament again here at North West Durham next time, so please give generously. In any event, please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

No Respect Without Self-Respect

In place of the singing of "Oh, Jeremy Corbyn" to the tune of Seven Nation Army, get used to hearing "Oh, Rebecca Long-Bailey" to the tune of Hi Ho Silver Lining. Long-Bailey as the Left's candidate for Leader is John McDonnell's final triumph over Corbyn, whose own preferred successor has just lost her seat.

If I were to enter the premises, then I would be kicked down the stairs. So could someone please check this for me? Since one good turn deserves another, is Ben Sellers now employing Laura Pidcock as a shopgirl? If not, why not?

Away from this nonsense, though, no, I am not going to be joining George Galloway's Workers' Party of Britain. As the presence of Joti Brar as Deputy Leader makes clear, just as Respect was the SWP plus George, or vice versa depending on how you look at it, so this is the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist) plus George, or vice versa depending on how you look at it.

The what? Well, it has deep roots, but in its present form it is the result of a breakaway from Arthur Scargill's party because the latter was insufficiently supportive of North Korea. As with the SWP, I am afraid that George is being rather opportunistic here. His old allies did share his opposition to the Iraq War, but he has never been a Trotskyist. And his new allies do share his support for Brexit and his opposition to "woke" identity politics, but he will never be a Maoist.

I will be standing for Parliament again here at North West Durham next time, so please give generously. In any event, please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

Central To The Persecution

As the Director of Public Prosecutions, Keir Starmer was central to the persecution of Julian Assange, who is still in prison even though he has served his sentence for skipping bail and the Swedish investigation into him has been dropped. Jess Phillips is also a key player in all of that. Away with the pair of them.

Of the five members of the last House of Commons who said or did anything for Assange, only Grahame Morris is still there, with Kelvin Hopkins, Ann Clwyd and Ronnie Campbell having retired, and with Chris Williamson having lost his seat.

But I will be standing for Parliament again here at North West Durham next time, so please give generously. In any event, please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

Class Clowns?

Blairism and Corbynism have successively been synonymous with the same North London borough. Under Tony Blair, it was said all the time that the metropolitan liberal elite, or words to that effect, had stolen the Labour Party from the working classes in the traditional Labour heartlands, or words to that effect.

The same had also been said all the time under Harold Wilson, surrounded as he was by his fellow Oxonians. Under Clement Attlee, nobody seems to have thought that his heavily public school Cabinets were, on that basis, even worth remarking upon.

And at the very dawn of the Labour Party, the backgrounds and lifestyles of the likes of Sidney Webb, the author of the old Clause IV, were roundly mocked by political opponents whose own upper-middle-class credentials were equally impeccable.

The feeling is starting to grow that the Labour Party has never been anything other than a vehicle for what would now be called the metropolitan liberal elite, with the unions there only to pay for it, and in the past to get out the vote for it, such as ensuring that the miners of Seaham returned Webb as their MP.

Certainly, all Labour Governments have treated the unions with contempt when it has suited them. Leaving aside how much of the Winter of Discontent ever really happened, something certainly did, and it did because, once the academic fashion has shifted to monetarism, then Denis Healey's attitude to the proles was that they could like it or lump it. More than 40 years later, here we are.

Having the solid support of 40 per cent of the working class, with another 15 per cent or so persuadable to varying degrees, has in fact only ever put Labour in the same position as the Conservatives, who have also always had the solid support of 40 per cent of the working class, with another 15 per cent or so persuadable to varying degrees.

But those need not be the only options. I will be standing for Parliament again here at North West Durham next time, so please give generously. In any event, please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

The Dirty War On The NHS

People deride ITV, but the incomparable John Pilger's sixty-first film for that network will be broadcast at 10:45 pm tomorrow.

It was not allowed to be shown during the General Election campaign, which speaks for itself.

Councillor Watch: Day 154

I hereby invite all Labour members of Durham County Council who believe me to be guilty of the criminal charges against me to email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com and say so.

I would not be able to reply to those emails, but every day the names of those who had sent them to me would appear here. So far, I have received none.

#Laura4Lanchester?

From the public house to the House of the Lord, I am greeted as a conquering hero for having taken all of 414 votes, 0.9 per cent, the bottom of the poll, and a lost deposit. Anyone would think that I had won. Largely because of who lost.

But even if everyone who had voted for me had voted for her, then she would still have lost. Some of my voters were sitting Labour Councillors, but others had never voted Labour in their lives and they never will.

Come to that, few, if any, of Watts Stelling's voters this time might otherwise have voted Labour at a General Election. Since the Conservative vote more than held up, then it must have been the Brexit Party's voters who were mostly former Labour voters. Here as nationally, this was about Brexit.

I am already a declared candidate for 2024, so any other candidate of the Left, although it is wildly unlikely that this Constituency Labour Party would now select one (it never selected Laura Pidcock on either occasion), would in fact be splitting my vote, not the other way round.

You either know, or you are too young ever to know, that, even though I voted proudly for Pat Glass and Ed Miliband in 2015, I have waited a long time for Labour to lose North West Durham, and while I do not in principle begrudge it any other seat, it will never win back this one while there is breath in my body.

By the next General Election, that will be more than 20 years in the past. But it is current to me every moment of every day, the defining experience of my life. In the early hours of Friday morning, I had the counting staff in stitches as, while the votes piled up, I danced around my walking stick like Charlie Chaplin.

Yes, Laura, this is personal. But not against you. In fact, since your posters are still up outside your house, I suggest that there is still a political future for you in Lanchester. My late father's friend, and my own colleague over many years as a Parish Councillor and a school governor, Ossie Johnson, is certainly retiring from Durham County Council in 2021. Right when, having won three parliamentary seats in County Durham, the Conservative Party doubtless intended to start putting serious skin in its municipal game here.

I will be standing for Parliament again here at North West Durham next time, so please give generously. In any event, please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

Let The Word Go Forth From This Time And Place

To friend and foe alike, even if I cannot claim to have been born in this century. Soberingly, though, people have just voted who were.

I very nearly did not write this post. Chris Williamson and George Galloway are friends of mine.

But Chris, who was an incumbent seeking re-election where he had previously been the Leader of the Council, has just managed only 241 more votes than I have. And George, who is the real, live George Galloway, has just managed only 75 more votes than were managed by the real, live David Lindsay. 

Had George taken my advice and stood at Birmingham Yardley, then there might now be no prospect of Jess Phillips as Leader of the Labour Party. But hey, ho. He and Chris have each taken 1.4 per cent of the vote. Each has lost his deposit, and Chris has joined me at the bottom of the poll.

Both are in their sixties, and by the 2024 General Election George will be 70. He remains a hugely important commentator, and he and Chris both remain hugely important campaigners. But their days as electoral players have come to an end.

I will be standing for Parliament again here at North West Durham next time, so please give generously. In any event, please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

One Nation, Three Parties

The Conservative Party now has responsibility for representing in the House of Commons numerous of the poorest communities in England and Wales. Those are places whose defining political experience was that of being ravaged by Thatcherism, and which entirely failed to notice the 13 years of Labour Government that some people would tell you had happened in the meantime. 

Here in what was then Hilary Armstrong's constituency, no such Labour Government ever happened to us. Evidently, it never happened to the residents of Sedgefield, either. Or look even at seats that Labour retained. At North Durham, Kevan Jones's total this time was 44 votes fewer than his majority had been when he was first elected, in 2001.

The United Kingdom is due to leave the European Union next month, practically five years before the next General Election. To have any hope of holding seats like North West Durham and Sedgefield, never mind of winning seats like North Durham into the bargain, then Boris Johnson, who has no ideology beyond Boris Johnson, is going to have to spend much as a Miliband Government would have done.

In so doing, and we already see this in the positioning for the Labour Leadership, he will tear the Labour Party apart. The Blairites, no more than a fifth of Labour Party members but well over four fifths of Labour MPs, are far to the right of any such economic programme, as was clear from their vicious failure to consider implementing anything like it during their prolonged period in power. But the Corbynites, no more than one tenth of Labour MPs but well over two thirds of Labour Party members, are noticeably to its left. 

Each finds it bewildering that the other ever joined the Labour Party in the first place. And both would want to oppose Johnson's reward schemes for the places that had given him such a thumping majority. But they would wish to do so from diametrically opposite positions. There will be no reason whatever for them to remain in the same party, and every reason for them not to do so. 

The Blairite faction might subsume the fiercely pro-austerity Liberal Democrats, who also share its foreign policy hawkishness. They even appear to share it on principle, whereas the Blairites back to the hilt America, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and increasingly also Narendra Modi's India, because they are paid to hold that line. The Corbynites are principled opponents without the other side's having to pay them a penny, while the Conservatives are now openly awash with Moscow Gold and Riyadh Gold alike, thereby disinclining them to attack the proxies of either paymaster.

To us peace-loving types, that is a strategy of sorts, I suppose. Although only one lot of proxies stages attacks on the streets of Britain. The Conservative and Blairite pecuniary relationship with the House of Saud is not keeping us safe from its other dependants. I will be standing for Parliament again here at North West Durham next time, so please give generously. In any event, please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

BBC Trust

The decriminalisation of nonpayment of the BBC licence fee would be a good start, but following the introduction of the Universal Basic Income, then that fee ought to be made voluntary, with as many adults as wished to pay it at any given address free to do so, including those who did not own a television set but who greatly valued, for example, Radio Four. 

The Trustees would then be elected by and from among the licence-payers. Candidates would have to be sufficiently independent to qualify in principle for the remuneration panels of their local authorities. Each licence-payer would vote for one, with the top two elected.

The electoral areas would be Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, and each of the nine English regions. The Chairman would be appointed by the relevant Secretary of State, with the approval of the relevant Select Committee. And the term of office would be four years. 

One would not need to be a member of the Trust (i.e., a licence-payer) to listen to or watch the BBC, just as one does not need to be a member of the National Trust to visit its properties, or a member of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution to be rescued by its boats.

I will be standing for Parliament again here at North West Durham next time, so please give generously. In any event, please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

Severe Doubt

Peter Hitchens writes:

The global chemical weapons watchdog is facing renewed questions after fresh details emerged about how it suppressed the findings of its own inspectors who raised serious doubts about an alleged poison gas attack in Syria. 

The Mail on Sunday can reveal that a senior official at the Organisation for Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) demanded the ‘removal of all traces’ of a document which undermined claims that gas cylinders had been dropped from the air – a key element of the ‘evidence’ that the Syrian regime was responsible. 

Unconfirmed reports and videos showing the bodies of adults and children foaming at the mouth in Douma, a rebel-held Damascus suburb, shocked the world in April 2018.

A week later, without waiting for proof that chemical weapons had been used, Britain, France and the US launched a retaliatory missile strike, the biggest Western military action of the eight-year war.

It was only after the blitz that a team of OPCW inspectors – non-political scientists – were able to visit Douma to investigate the attack, later detailing their conclusions in a report.

Last month, The Mail on Sunday revealed details of a leaked email – whose authenticity has since been verified by the OPCW – which protested that the scientists’ original interim report had been censored to change its meaning.

Fernando Arias, Director-General of the OPCW, has insisted that he stands by ‘the independent, professional conclusions’ of the organisation’s final report which was released in March.

But this newspaper has now obtained the team’s original, uncensored interim report which differs sharply from all later versions, including the March document.

That final report claimed there were ‘reasonable grounds’ that chlorine gas was used in Douma, but an OPCW whistleblower says only tiny quantities of chlorine were detected in forms possible to find in any household. 

The original interim report also mentioned for the first time doubts about the origin of the cylinders, saying:

‘The FFM [Fact-Finding Mission] team is unable to provide satisfactory explanations for the relatively moderate damage to the cylinders allegedly dropped from an unknown height, compared to the destruction caused to the rebar-reinforced roofs.

‘In the case of Location 4 [one of two sites where a cylinder was found], how the cylinder ended up on the bed, given the point at which it allegedly penetrated the room, remains unclear.’ 

The report called for further studies to clarify the point. One such study was then conducted by Ian Henderson, a veteran OPCW inspector and specialist chemical engineer with military experience.

In it, Mr Henderson, who visited the Douma site, cast severe doubt on the belief that the cylinders had been dropped from the air.

This was crucial because only the Syrian regime had aircraft. If the cylinders could be shown to have been dropped from above, it would strongly point to Syrian President Bashar Assad’s guilt.

However, after careful consultation with other experts, Mr Henderson concluded there was a ‘higher probability that both cylinders were manually placed … rather than being delivered from aircraft’. 

But perhaps most shocking of all were the actions of a senior OPCW official whose name is known to The Mail on Sunday and who is known to some of the organisation’s staff as ‘Voldemort’.

Mr Henderson tried to get his research included in the final report, but when it became clear it would be excluded, he lodged a copy in a secure registry, known as the Documents Registry Archive (DRA).

This is normal practice for such confidential material, but when ‘Voldemort’ heard about it, he sent an email to subordinates saying:

‘Please get this document out of DRA … And please remove all traces, if any, of its delivery/storage/whatever in DRA’. Another striking omission from the final report was the removal of detailed evidence (contained in the original interim report). This highlighted dramatic inconsistencies in witness statements. This evidence, clear in the interim report, was, according to the sources, replaced with ‘cherry-picked’ quotes from witnesses and ‘there was no systematic presentation of the discrepancies’. 

The uncensored original interim report raises other doubts about the chlorine claim, saying: ‘The inconsistency between the presence of a putative, chlorine-containing choking or blood agent on the one hand and the testimonies of alleged witnesses and symptoms observed from video footage and photographs, on the other, cannot be rationalised.’ 

The final report omitted key reservations, expressed in the original interim report, that the symptoms seen in films of the alleged victims did not fit any gas that might have been used at Douma.

Alleged casualties shown in videos of the attack were foaming at the mouth in a way that might be expected of victims of sarin, but not by victims of chlorine. 

Yet all the reports agree that no traces of sarin were found at Douma. These doubts were confirmed by expert toxicologists consulted by the OPCW investigation team on a visit to Germany in June 2018. 

They concluded ‘there was no correlation between symptoms and chlorine exposure’. In a key passage it adds ‘the team considered two possible explanations for the incongruity.

‘A) The victims were exposed to another highly toxic chemical agent that gave rise to the symptoms observed and has so far gone undetected.

‘B) The fatalities resulted from a non-chemical-related incident.’

In other words, either the victims died from an unknown, undetected gas for which no evidence exists or there never was a chemical attack. 

Sources stress that the scientists involved are ‘non-political, utterly uninterested in any strategic implications of what they reveal’. 

They just ‘feel that the OPCW has a duty to be true to its own science, and not to be influenced by political considerations as they fear it has been’. 

An internal memo seen by The Mail on Sunday suggests that as many 20 OPCW staff have expressed private doubts about the suppression of information or the manipulation of evidence.

The OPCW media office now declines to respond to questions from The Mail on Sunday. Senior OPCW staff members who were contacted directly also did not reply to questions.

Councillor Watch: Day 153

I hereby invite all Labour members of Durham County Council who believe me to be guilty of the criminal charges against me to email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com and say so.

I would not be able to reply to those emails, but every day the names of those who had sent them to me would appear here. So far, I have received none.