I can reveal that Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall will not be doing Strictly Come Dancing. They asked, but they were told that they were not famous.
You cannot now be younger than 50 if you voted in 1983. A large proportion of those who did are now dead.
That all of Corbyn's critics both inside and outside the Labour Party seem to think that it was last week, says a very great deal indeed.
In any case, what was Britain like then, and well after then?
Even I can just about remember when everywhere that sold The Sun, the Daily Mail, the Daily Express and the Daily Mirror also sold the Morning Star. The Corbyn win will bring back those days, I reckon.
Everywhere that sold The Spectator and the New Statesman also sold Marxism Today, an official publication of the Communist Party of Great Britain; they all sold Living Marxism, too.
Outlets that went a bit more recherché, and railway station newspaper stalls, also sold Soviet Weekly, which was an official publication of the USSR itself, and Pravda in English, which was exactly as its name suggested.
These things, which were by no means all the same thing, were part of mainstream culture and debate. Somehow, the Realm did not fall.
In any case, what was Britain like then, and well after then?
Even I can just about remember when everywhere that sold The Sun, the Daily Mail, the Daily Express and the Daily Mirror also sold the Morning Star. The Corbyn win will bring back those days, I reckon.
Everywhere that sold The Spectator and the New Statesman also sold Marxism Today, an official publication of the Communist Party of Great Britain; they all sold Living Marxism, too.
Outlets that went a bit more recherché, and railway station newspaper stalls, also sold Soviet Weekly, which was an official publication of the USSR itself, and Pravda in English, which was exactly as its name suggested.
These things, which were by no means all the same thing, were part of mainstream culture and debate. Somehow, the Realm did not fall.
You know what you have to do.
Burnham, Cooper and Kendall believe in abstention, and each of them ought therefore to be treated to a nice, big dollop of it.
For Deputy, Stella Creasy and Angela Eagle are well worth a second and third preference, or vice versa.
But, of course, first preference has to go to the man who brought down the News of the World, Tom Watson.
Oliver Kamm Tweets.
ReplyDelete@LNJStokes Neil Clark is public-school-ed blogger who supports death penalty, opposes immigration, supports Putin, denies Milosevic crimes.""
Clark supports the death penalty, opposes immigration (and opposes the West's aggression against Ukraine and Serbia).
Well, so does Peter Hitchens, whom Kamm admires and just Tweeted his admiration for again yesterday.
Thank you for this. Kamm long ago blocked me on Twitter, so I have to get by without his pearls of wisdom.
DeleteIs it right he supports Russian annexation of Ukraine AND German annexation of Silesia, Pomerania and East Prussia? Good way to provoke global thermonuclear war.
ReplyDeleteWho?
DeleteAlthough Germany does have the good sense not to have nuclear weapons. Hence the much higher standard of living for ordinary people than obtains in any country (check them, it's true) that does spend its money on those instead.
There you are - a self-proclaimed Communist and supporter of the USSR. Sorry, but Ronnie smashed it, so you'll have to start again. John Galt
ReplyDeleteWho?
DeleteAnd "Ronnie" did not "smash" the USSR. It collapsed exactly as and when Enoch Powell and others always said that it would. It had absolutely nothing to do with some old B-movie actor with Alzheimer's who happened to be on telly a lot at the time. It was no more Reagan's (or Thatcher's) doing than it was David Hasselhoff's.
John Galt? I am the only person whom I have ever met who has read Atlas Shrugged to the end. Absolutely nothing would persuade me to open it again. Ayn Rand was quite possibly the worst novelist ever. And, hilariously, she ended up on welfare.
JP2?
DeleteHis advent expressed the trends, yes. But British and American paleocons predicted the whole thing from the start. They were right.
DeleteTell that to the people there.
DeleteA lot of them have told it me. But anyway, people like are normally scornful, and not without cause, of the view that, "It's for the people there to judge." That would not be your view of European colonialism or of American military intervention.
DeleteAssume you are of the school of thought that there was never a Soviet military threat.
DeleteIndeed I am, for indeed there was not. There were two right-wing views of the Soviet Union, that it was incapable of getting bread from one town to the next, and that it was poised to conquer Western Europe and even North America.
DeleteThose two things could not both have been true. In fact, as exposed by the ILP and others on the anti-Stalinist Left long before the Tories noticed, it was the first part that was correct, rendering the second part impossible.
What became the Old Right did largely catch up, and indeed do sterling work. But it was the New Right that carried the day on that side, setting the pattern for the absurd belief that merely because a regime was nasty, and sometimes merely because it was inefficient or corrupt, then it was somehow a threat, even an existential threat, to us.
We all know how that delusion is continuing to play out.