Party On?

Julie Burchill sometimes bemoans the utter impossibility of drumming out of the London media certain people from the right families. I have long suspected that she had Toby Young, hardly unknown to her, in mind.

Last night, the man most recently known for being the alleged support among the general public for a deranged schools policy which has now been as good as abandoned, was on This Week to shriek and screech that the Labour Party Leadership might be won by someone other than The Approved Candidate, and possibly even by someone who held Unapproved Opinions. And that with Labour already neck-and-neck with the Conservatives, even before the cuts. I mean, where would it all end? Britain must remain a one-party state, or else ... well, or else what, exactly?

Still, in order to preserve the One-Party State of Britain, the media has managed not to mention, or not to mention until it was too late to affect the outcome, that the One Party's candidate was a torturer who was going to enormous lengths to try and cover up his indictable crimes against humanity. Had the Fourth Estate done its job properly, then this evil, hateful creature's candidacy would have been strangled at birth, and he himself might very well have left Parliament by now. There might even have been some effect if the preening, increasingly co-opted "blogosphere" had exercised anything like the role that it claims to have.

The Blogging Establishment has, however, got its man in Tower Hamlets. Or, at any rate, it thinks that it has. But what if Lutfur Rahman's Independent candidacy for Mayor is successful, as Ken Livingstone's was back in the day? Labour has a very poor record where securing election to these thoroughly un-British offices is concerned. And you do not have to be the deeply unlikeable Rahman or one of his supporters to be more than a little uneasy as the presupposition, as if it were self-evident, that only white, upper-middle-class, Oxbridge secularists are morally eligible to participate in the political process, even down to merely joining a political party. People like that don't approve of the black churches, either. Or of the Catholic Church.

As for the calls for Labour to expel Labour Left Briefing, they are hardly the only washed-up, unrepentant old Communists, fellow-travellers and Trotskyists in the Labour Party. How about expelling them all? Beginning with the torturer, David Miliband. But that isn't going to happen, any more than the washed-up, unrepentant old Communists, fellow-travellers and Trotskyists who surround the Coalition are going to be kicked out of anything. It is time to start again.