Let's Get These Parties Started

Over there, healthcare went through strictly because it not only contained a ban on the federal funding of abortion, but was also accompanied by an Executive Order almost bringing that ban up to the stringency written into the House Bill by the man who thus delivered the votes of politicians like himself: not just seriously pro-life and pro-family, but also seriously pro-worker, pro-consumer, anti-imperialist and anti-militarist. Such a figure should have been the running mate in 2008, should be (but presumably won't be) the running mate in 2012, and should be the Presidential nominee in 2016. But the work has to start right now. The work of restoring something called the Democratic Party.

And over here? If there is still even the merest modicum of justice, then Byers is looking at prison for making false statements while seeking employment, and Hewitt and Hoon are looking at not much better. Like almost all of the Blairite rump, they are retiring, anyway. Here's to no peerages or quango posts for any of them. Send them back to their Stalinist, fellow-travelling or Trotskyist roots. Say what you like about, for example, John Cryer (in any case only replacing another Campaign Group MP) or Ian Lavery, but neither is in favour of further European integration, both would participate in any necessarily cross-party and backbench attempt to reverse existing erosions of our self-government, and neither would ever put himself in a position like this.

Those calling for an all-out ban on second jobs are wrong. Michael Foot and Tony Benn were working journalists throughout their time as MPs. But if Arthur Scargill's Vicar on Earth can have a place at Westminster, as a few such figures always used to have, then literally hundreds of places must again be found for figures very much like this. That is already happening in America. If it happened both there and here, then it would also happen in Canada, Australia and New Zealand. For which, among a thousand other reasons, it must happen here without delay.