Right and Wrong

It beggars belief that the Fabian Review feels it necessary to publish an article against those who would wish Labour to commit itself to the retention of the present Government's departmental spending limits. What on earth do the advocates of such a policy imagine that the Labour Party is for? And on which planet do they live, having a recent record of extolling the genius of George Osborne while castigating his critics as "deniers"?

The comparable policy was quite unnecessary in 1997. Labour would have won that General Election, anyway. The result under Tony Blair in fact resulted in a shift to the fiscal Right in certain areas compared to the relatively progressive policies of John Major. To things like the National Health Service as surely as to things like the hereditary peerage, Major had the sentimental attachment a working-class Tory, and none the worse for that.

The commitment to the previous departmental spending limits, like that to never raising the basic or top rates of income tax (which, again, there was in any case no need to do in 1997), created a terrible, almost literal hostile to fortune as Labour was in the long run unable to deal with dramatically altered economic realities.

In one policy area, there was a striking shift to the fiscal Right in 2010. It started with far-fetched academic and think tank papers. Those became pickled into a rigid dogma, a code. They have gone through the years sticking to that, outdated, misplaced, irrelevant to the real needs. And they have ended up in the grotesque chaos of a Tory Government, a Tory Government, scuttling round Afghanistan and the world handing out redundancy notices to Her Majesty's soldiers, sailors and airmen. Even while expecting those soldiers, sailors and airmen to fight wars wholly unconnected, or even inimical, to our national interests, from Libya to Mali and on into Syria, Iran, North Korea, and heaven only knows where else.

In all fairness, even Jim Murphy is sharply critical of those cuts, despite being an ardent member of the Labour New Right that emerged, in point of fact out of the detritus of Eurocommunism and of various Trotskyist groupuscules, from 1994 onwards. But he supports the wars. And he supports keeping, even "like for like" replacing, the worse than useless Trident nuclear submarine programme.

Those are defining shibboleths of that Right, together with the advocacy of draconian limits on civil liberties, of the dismantlement of England's NHS such as Alan Milburn and Paul Corrigan could never get past Gordon Brown, of Michael Gove's in any case failed or never-attempted schools policies straight out of Tony Blair's Policy Unit in the days when it was headed by David Miliband, of European federalism within and under an American hegemony in political hock to the secular Israeli Far Right, and of extreme social liberalism as a non-negotiable badge of party loyalty and identity.

That Right is whining bitterly at the "stitch-up" of the process for selecting candidates for next year's European Elections, which Labour is certainly going to win handsomely and at which it can reasonably hope to top the poll in all nine English regions as well as in Wales, where the Conservatives came top last time.

In his day, Blair cleared out three quarters of Labour MEPs in one go by rejecting them altogether as candidates or placing them so far down the newly created party lists that they stood no realistic chance of re-election. The entire party lists system for MEPs was introduced for that reason and no other. It was an internal Labour Party stitch-up, no more and no less. It is now on course to work just as well as an internal Conservative Party stitch-up in 2014. Not that very many Conservatives of any tendency are going to be returned to the European Parliament in 2014.

But the New Right is allowed to do these things. It is a problem when other factions, far more critical of the EU, do so. It is undeniable in practice, just as it is unproblematic in principle, that they have just done exactly that. Not, for the most part, the (very anti-EU) "Hard Left", as is being squealed in certain places. But, in post-1994 terms, the relatively leftish trade union machine.

The allegations being hurled by those who are used to their own way are positively side-splitting, such as discrimination against potential candidates with business backgrounds, or against those married to members of the Armed Forces. The truth is that those applicants must have been to some extent insiders if anyone ever even bothered to write back to them acknowledging receipt of their applications. Most people do not get that, or expect to get it.

However, these noisy wound-lickers are quietly retrenching elsewhere. Take, for example, the Westminster constituency of North West Durham, which they lost spectacularly in 2010. Here in that centre of the democratic universe, we now have a Member of Parliament, Pat Glass, who is already bound by collective responsibility as a frontbencher and who is very definitely going places. Pat marched under the Burnhope banner at last year's Miners' Gala. She has signed EDM 1334, which protests at the wider media's boycott of the Morning Star, for which she has occasionally written as an MP.

Pat's two closest backbench allies voted against cancelling this week's Prime Minister's Questions for the sake of Margaret Thatcher's funeral. Pat herself did not attend the recall of Parliament following Thatcher's death. One of those allies, who chairs Labour Left, uses his Twitter account to encourage people to follow Pat's, calling her a "Labour Left MP". The other, perhaps her closest ally of all, resigned as a PPS in order to vote against the retrospective legalisation of workfare.

Like him, Pat did not vote to abolish the traditional definition of marriage as only ever the union of one man and one woman. Her name has appeared as a signatory along with those of several of the most faithful tenders of the flame of orthodox Catholic Moral Teaching within the Palace of Westminster: David Alton (probably the best Rome-connected man in these Islands; anything with his name on it has been at least tacitly approved from the very top), Tommy McAvoy, Don Touhig, Rob Flello, John Pugh, Stephen Pound, Bill Cash, Jonathan Evans, Ronnie Campbell, Paul Murphy, Alasdair McDonnell.

Well, we cannot be having any of that, can we? In this all-women shortlist seat, the New Right is seeking to burnish the CV of a potential successor who happens to be the ladyfriend, or whatever the term is at our age, of the man whose coronation it had expected to hold until the National Executive Committee intervened and declared him, its employee, to be chromosomally ineligible.

There are those who maintain that he was the reason for his employer's action, since his selection would undoubtedly have led to the loss of this seat to the Lib Dems, whose choice of candidate in contrast to past practice strongly indicated an expectation of taking it. But I am not convinced. Some time before the 2005 Election, someone who was then serving on the NEC with Hilary Armstrong told me, on the subject of Hilary's eventual retirement, that, "Of course, it ought to be you [something that had never previously occurred to me], but it will be an all-women shortlist." Perhaps that was when I left the party emotionally.

Anyway, with him apparently banned from ever again seeking any elected office because of his record when he has done so, and with an all-women shortlist apparently a permanent arrangement once imposed, his paramour is being fielded as a County Council candidate in a ward where she does not live. A campaign involving the use of vomit-inducing terms such as "local mum" and "mum of a teen", as if Philip Gould were still alive, is supposed to put this putative Lurleen Wallace in pole position for ... well, when, exactly?

Pat will be 63, and a Minister, in 2020. In 2025, she will be 67, and probably still a Minister. The 17 years until 2030 seem an awfully long time for a supposed high-flyer, who is even now in her middle thirties, to hang around pretending to be a County Councillor, and that for people whom she barely knows. Of course, she would do no such thing. With their candidate having been given a suitable platform, the Blairites would unleash civil war within this Constituency Labour Party in the run-up, if not to the next General Election, then undoubtedly to the one after that.

But with Pat on the frontbench, it is perfectly clear that the Labour Party has already changed. If it is to have a right wing, then that will have to be an Even Newer Right, very much in the spirit of its Old Right. At least in the second party that it infested, the first having been the Communist Party, what came to be called Blairism is now over. The Con Dem parties are a different story, but it is actively destroying those. UKIP will be next. You read it here first.

The much-missed Derwentside District Council was run as a partnership between Common Sense Labour and the Derwentside Independents, who provided Common Sense Labour with a majority against Nutter Labour, which thought that it was left-wing but which was really just funny in the head. In return for two Scrutiny Chairs, while never contesting the Leader's ward, I am sure that you know how these things go.

Here at Lanchester, all of the candidates from inside the ward, unlike the Conservative (who is not even from inside the county) and one of the UKIPers, would be good. But the two sitting Councillors, Ossie Johnson and Richie Young, continue to embody that old, hugely successful alliance between Labour and Independent. I shall be voting to re-elect them both.

The opportunity also now obtains to elect such embodiments in the persons of Liam Carr and Watts Stelling at Leadgate and Medomsley, and of John Davies and Stephen Robinson at Benfieldside. It is a pity that Consett South is a single-member ward, since Malcolm Clarke is going to be a superb Councillor, but the return of Derek Hicks along with him would have made for a highly effective arrangement.

At Consett North, two of my political godfathers are on the ballot to fill two seats: Labour's Clive Robson, whom I knew through pro-life long before I was a Labour Party member, and whose nomination paper has been signed by the man who runs SPUC; and the mighty Alex Watson OBE, now an Independent but who was the Leader of Derwentside District Council in its glory days. Please note that, except perhaps in Malcolm's case, these are not predictions. These are expressions of aspiration.

Derwentside Independents are still only fielding one candidate against, and therefore not really against, Alex. Some things never change. Whereas what might politely be called the lack of co-ordination among different collections of Independents in the Burnopfield and Dipton ward has resulted in the nomination of two from Burnopfield and three from Dipton, against one Labourite from each village for two seats.

And I do confidently predict that that will have the doubly happy consequence of returning Joanne Carr to municipal office while finally giving his head to Ivan Jewell. No carpetbagging Blairite careerists, they. And definitely not standing as proxies for anyone else.