The Pits

If there is one thing about which the Blairite Right is completely hysterical, then it is anything to do with the miners. 

That hatred is like nothing else in British politics.

Partly, it is because of the Eurocommunist roots of New Labour, as against the world of Mick McGahey and the Morning Star.

And partly, it is an uncomprehending fury, a furious incomprehension, that some people and some places not only voted Labour before the emergence of Tony Blair, but have continued to do so even after what, until yesterday, we had happily assumed to have been his departure from the scene.

His cultists have, however, been flogging this particular dead horse for a year. Give it up. 

A trade union is perfectly free to do whatever it likes with its money, unless it breaks the law.

A trade union with only 10 members, all of them living in the old mining corner of Northumberland, must be nothing if not accountable internally.

But quite apart from either of those points, why are the Murdoch media going after Ian Lavery, anyway?

Murdoch cannot possibly expect any other party to win the Wansbeck seat in the event of a by-election. Rather, he wants a very right-wing Labour MP there.

What are always his achingly posh London hacks additionally want an MP who is less frightfully working-class, who does not have an Irish surname, and who has not lived his entire life in the North East, which they have never visited, and which they imagine to be near Manchester.

¡No pasarán!