Beyond His Ken

Poor, sweet, simple Jim Fitzpatrick, whom the Blairite rump had wanted as Chief Whip, not only appears not to know how AV works, but also appears not to know that Ken Livingstone is actually on the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party, indeed has very recently topped the poll for it.

This carry on at Tower Hamlets may at least and at last mark the beginning of the end of directed elected mayors in this country, to which they are wholly unsuited. Islamists and Bengali communalists will have voted for Helal Abbas, who came third for the Labour nomination, behind Lutfur Rahman and a white candidate, but who was imposed specifically because he was a Muslim and a Bengali. Rahman's runaway victory will have been thanks, either to the active support of the White British majority in Tower Hamlets, or at the very least to that majority's refusal to turn out and vote for Labour's illegally imposed Islamist and Bengali-communalist candidate.

Meanwhile, Andrew Gilligan seems to be turning into another Michael Crick, he of the Myth of the Militant Tendency, which in reality barely existed beyond Merseyside and had far fewer members than even the International Socialists, or the Workers' Revolutionary Party (for some reason depicted by Nick Cohen in What's Left as having been of earth-shattering importance), or the International Marxist Group. But those were university-based, like the Communist Party. The purge of untypically working-class, frightfully provincial - why, even Scouse - Militant could be depicted as the purge of Trotskyism in particular and of Marxism in general. It was no such thing. Here we go again.