I am 100 per cent for
Corbyn now. Look at the alternative. Literally, look at it. That hair might
almost have been forgiveable at the time. But that fake bowtie?
Any half-decent trade union official or municipal luminary would have caned the whippersnapper in the street for that. As will certainly happen in Jeremy Corbyn's Restored Labour Party.
A party of public ownership, which is British ownership, safeguarding national and parliamentary sovereignty, and safeguarding the Union, both of which have been deliberately weakened by privatisation.
That was why Thatcher and Major pursued it, that was why Blair accepted it, that is why Cameron and Osborne have revived it, and that is why Kendall and Cooper (or, in any meaningful way, Burnham) do not wish to challenge it.
The sale of the public stake in RBS very considerably weakens the Union, at a time when such a move could not be more dangerous.
Burnham's proposal that the State be allowed to bid for rail franchises will be Conservative Party policy six months, if not six weeks, after Corbyn has become Leader of the Labour Party on a commitment to renationalisation. The bidding process will of course be rigged against the State, or at least against the British State. But even so.
That the State ought to some extent at least to pretend to set energy prices, a suggestion that was screamed down as lunacy before the General Election, is now accepted by the Government. Miliband ought to have demanded more. Who knows what we might have been given if he had done so?
Building on that partial progress, it is time for a Labour Leader who calls for the utilities to be taken back into public ownership. Let us see Cameron's and Osborne's effort to buy off the popularity of that one.
Likewise, let us see their reaction when Corbyn, as Leader of the Opposition, demands legislation for the real Living Wage. I remember when the Conservatives were opposed to a national statutory minimum wage at all. It was hugely controversial until it happened.
What with that, the windfall tax on the privatised utilities, the never-honoured commitment to renationalise the railways, and the de facto ruling out of participation in the process of convergence towards what has since become the euro, it is easy to forget quite how left-wing was the manifesto on which Labour won the 1997 General Election by a landslide.
One day, the renationalisation of our railways, of our utilities and of our postal service, will be like the Living Wage and the National Investment Bank (for suggesting which Bryan Gould was frozen out by the early Blairites).
That is to say, they will seem as commensensical as the minimum wage and staying out of the euro do now, and they will be the subject of exactly as much crossparty controversy, namely none whatever.
Moreover, the same will be true of the strong parliamentary and municipal accountability that public ownership so often lacked in the past. That was the Labour Left's criticism of it from the start, it has always remained so, and it is echoed in the present day by Blue Labour.
Jeremy Corbyn's articulation of it demonstrates that he is in no more doubt as to what is to be the Right of his party than as to what is to be its Left. It is now up to that Right, either to get on the train, or to get under it.
Any half-decent trade union official or municipal luminary would have caned the whippersnapper in the street for that. As will certainly happen in Jeremy Corbyn's Restored Labour Party.
A party of public ownership, which is British ownership, safeguarding national and parliamentary sovereignty, and safeguarding the Union, both of which have been deliberately weakened by privatisation.
That was why Thatcher and Major pursued it, that was why Blair accepted it, that is why Cameron and Osborne have revived it, and that is why Kendall and Cooper (or, in any meaningful way, Burnham) do not wish to challenge it.
The sale of the public stake in RBS very considerably weakens the Union, at a time when such a move could not be more dangerous.
Burnham's proposal that the State be allowed to bid for rail franchises will be Conservative Party policy six months, if not six weeks, after Corbyn has become Leader of the Labour Party on a commitment to renationalisation. The bidding process will of course be rigged against the State, or at least against the British State. But even so.
That the State ought to some extent at least to pretend to set energy prices, a suggestion that was screamed down as lunacy before the General Election, is now accepted by the Government. Miliband ought to have demanded more. Who knows what we might have been given if he had done so?
Building on that partial progress, it is time for a Labour Leader who calls for the utilities to be taken back into public ownership. Let us see Cameron's and Osborne's effort to buy off the popularity of that one.
Likewise, let us see their reaction when Corbyn, as Leader of the Opposition, demands legislation for the real Living Wage. I remember when the Conservatives were opposed to a national statutory minimum wage at all. It was hugely controversial until it happened.
What with that, the windfall tax on the privatised utilities, the never-honoured commitment to renationalise the railways, and the de facto ruling out of participation in the process of convergence towards what has since become the euro, it is easy to forget quite how left-wing was the manifesto on which Labour won the 1997 General Election by a landslide.
One day, the renationalisation of our railways, of our utilities and of our postal service, will be like the Living Wage and the National Investment Bank (for suggesting which Bryan Gould was frozen out by the early Blairites).
That is to say, they will seem as commensensical as the minimum wage and staying out of the euro do now, and they will be the subject of exactly as much crossparty controversy, namely none whatever.
Moreover, the same will be true of the strong parliamentary and municipal accountability that public ownership so often lacked in the past. That was the Labour Left's criticism of it from the start, it has always remained so, and it is echoed in the present day by Blue Labour.
Jeremy Corbyn's articulation of it demonstrates that he is in no more doubt as to what is to be the Right of his party than as to what is to be its Left. It is now up to that Right, either to get on the train, or to get under it.
Beyond satire. The loony IRA supporter Jeremy Corbyn three times refuses to condemn IRA acts of terrorism against British civilians-but vows to introduce same sex marriage and Labour's 1967 Abortion Act there.
ReplyDeletehttps://uk.news.yahoo.com/video/corbyn-supports-same-sex-marraige-101041859.html
As Peter Hitchens said of this mad creature on BBC Any Questions-lets have Corbyn as Labour leader, on the condition that we can have someone "on the other side who speaks for patriotism, for marriage, for Christianity and for the traditions of this country."
Indeed.
You are hopelessly outside the loop, and based on this, so is he.
DeleteLike most of the noisily Unionist contingent in the London media, he maintains little or no contact with the Unionists who live in Northern Ireland.
You will notice that neither the UUP nor the DUP has said any of this. Nor will they.
I know why not. He ought to know why not. And you need to leave alone matters that are beyond your comprehension or your competence.
As I said on an earlier thread, Corbyn has more in common with the DUP today, which voted against the Welfare Bill and wants to abolish the Bedroom Tax and which has sat in coalition with Sinn Fein for years, than Hitchens has with either of the Unionist parties.
DeleteHitchens is an integrationist, a position invented by an Englishman that never got any takeup in Northern Ireland and was rendered obsolete by Scottish and Welsh devolution. The UUP gave up all tendencies, always a minority, in that direction in 1998 and the DUP never had any.
Who cares about the anti-Cameron right? Standing as itself instead of on Cameron's coattails it managed one MP this year and he disagrees with Ukip about everything anyhow.
But Hitchens is not on the anti-Cameron right. He is like one of those Hard Left Catholic Labour MPs who oppose abortion and gay marriage while supporting renationalisation, trade union rights, council housing, the Bennite case against the EU, reopening the pits, rebuilding the railways, scrapping Trident, opposing neocon wars and attacks on civil liberties, and making Jeremy Corbyn Leader and then Prime Minister. He should stop pretending.
And as I replied on that thread, Powellism still has a certain Fleet Street following. But then, it never had anything else. That is true in relation to far more than Northern Ireland alone.
DeleteDouglas Carswell, insurgently elected for the fourth time, is a kind of post-Powellite, unencumbered by the internal contradictions that arose out of the complexities of its originator's personality.
A true believing free marketeer without complication, Carswell believes that there ought to be absolutely no immigration control whatever. As you say, such is the one and only MP whom UKIP has managed to return this year.
UKIP really has gone away after the floor was wiped with it. Nigel Farage was recently interviewed about Calais, but only as regular user of the Channel Tunnel.
Once Labour is committed to the programme that you outline, and especially once that includes being opposed to popular acceptance of the Cameron EU renegotiation of which the Conservative Party will of course be in full support, then Peter Hitchens will just have a choice to make.
He can carry on waiting and calling for either the Conservatives or, if it still exists, UKIP to become the Tony Benn With Grammar Schools And Hanging Party of his dreams. Or he can face reality.
I should add that his only points of difference with Corbyn are also points of difference with Cameron and the Conservative Party. He is going to need to explain, as much to himself as to anyone else, why he would fail to support a side with which he agreed on at least something, and indeed on rather a lot, against a side with which he disagreed about absolutely everything.
Please enlighten the uninformed as to the knowledge to which you refer in your first reply above. Your final sentence is a wonderful example of why Labour must be annihilated: inherently totalitarian - I know, you don't;
ReplyDeleteyou work, I'll tax you and live off the proceeds; the Road to Serfdom made flesh.
No, I'm just better-informed than you. To give another example of that fact, I have read The Road to Serfdom. That is why I do not think very much of it. No one, and there are not very many of us, who has ever reached the end of that book, ever does think very much of it.
DeleteThat point needs to be made more, neither the UUP nor the DUP has said a word against Corbyn and the DUP vote with him against austerity. A man with your connections will know all about it.
ReplyDeleteOne does one’s best for one’s public. Herewith, the word on the street.
DeleteThere being, as much as anything else, no National Health Service in the Irish Republic, Unionists do not share Jeremy Corbyn’s aspiration that Northern Ireland be incorporated into that Republic with the consent of the greater number of the inhabitants of each of the two current jurisdictions.
However, they do recognise that that aspiration is shared by considerable numbers of people in all parts of Northern Ireland.
They do not necessarily agree with Corbyn’s equal condemnation of all violence by State and non-State actors alike during the course of the Troubles.
However, they do acknowledge that that, too, is a legitimate view, and that it includes a full condemnation of Republican paramilitary activity.
In expressing his desire to see abortion and same-sex marriage extended to Northern Ireland, positions with either or both of which at least some Unionists are in strong disagreement, Corbyn accepts that these questions can be decided only by the Northern Ireland Assembly.
His parliamentary and wider support within the Labour Party contains the full range of opinion on these matters.
Although Corbyn is in principle in favour of the replacement of the monarchy with an elected Head of State, he gives that no priority, and there is in any case no possibility that any such proposal would ever pass in a referendum that he has indicated that he would not even seek to hold.
Corbyn is a supporter of the Palestinian cause, but he has repeatedly expressed his acceptance of the existence of the State of Israel. Again, there are staunch friends of Israel among his supporters in his own party.
Unionists are not unaware of the anti-British terrorist past of modern Zionism, or of the views of Arab Protestants in the Holy Land today.
Those who remain devoted either to Margaret Thatcher or to Tony Blair are the last people in any position to accuse anyone else of disloyalty to the pro-Union community in Northern Ireland, a community, moreover, that is suffering no less than any other as a consequence of the present British Government’s austerity programme.
Corbyn’s is a leading parliamentary voice against that programme, and he votes accordingly, even while others prefer the abstentionism of Sinn Féin.
That, in any case, is what I am being told.
It's great to check in and read the loons below the line on here.
ReplyDeleteBetween people who seriously think Peter Hitchens agrees with Jeremy Corbyn (the high tax, anti monarchy, pro terrorist pro abortion leftist loon) to people who think supporting the IRA is patriotic.
Boy, this blog really brings out the wildlife.
Looking at the general election results,(where Miliband was trounced and the only insurgent party to get four million votes was a proper Rightwing party) it appears none of the skulking weirdos on here speak for anyone in this country.
Thank heavens for that.
Well, apart from the thousands at Jeremy Corbyn's rallies. Which other politician in Britain today can do that? Which other has done it in decades?
DeleteAnd to which party do you refer? The one that got one seat, insurgently electing an incumbent for the fourth time? He, moreover, agrees with that party about more or less nothing.
Both he and it have since disappeared from public view. I was going to write "almost entirely". But there is no "almost" about it. They have vanished.
Meanwhile, Corbyn is going to win over 50 per cent of first preference votes from a party that is therefore very united indeed behind him, simply huge by modern standards, and still growing at an astonishing rate, all thanks to him. And he is not even Leader yet.
There were 10,000 people at one of Corbyn's rallies last week, ten thousand! I'd pay a lot more than three quid to see Ukip pull that one off in its glory days never mind now.
DeleteAnd they still needed an overspill, apparently. There will be more of this kind of thing in the coming months.
DeleteBy contrast, the Ranting Right exists only in the comments threads of certain websites whose authors are being paid very well indeed to laugh at their own readers.
Largely based abroad, and in that sense like those media outlets, the Ranting Right got absolutely nowhere in the recent General Election, so the joke has worn off and now they are just ignored.
They affect to believe at least theoretically in a Tory Party that has now won an overall majority actively against them, in churches that never cease to tell them that they are morally reprehensible, in a profoundly foreign monarchy (not a problem for me, but why isn't it for them?) that takes political positions wildly at variance from their own, in a Unionist community in Northern Ireland that agrees with them about absolutely nothing, and so on, and on, and on, and on, and on.
No wonder that they so very rarely live in this country. And now, they cannot claim some superior knowledge based on their 1950s childhoods as guaranteeing scores of UKIP MPs. Where are they?
Hilarious reading them on certain sites saying Corbyn is an opportunity for Ukip. Ukip is over, look how nobody above the line ever mentions it any more.
DeleteIf, as is being reported, Cameron is to contest the 2020 Election after all, then that is not because he thinks that he is bound to beat Corbyn. Rather, he is convinced that neither Osborne nor Johnson would stand the slightest chance of doing so.
Delete