Tim Farron gained seats, but he's still gone. Theresa May lost seats. She'll be gone, even from being gone.
Farron is no martyr. He does himself no credit by pretending to be one. It is simply that, with people like Vince Cable, Ed Davey and Jo Swinson back in Parliament, he was no longer needed.
For good or ill, those are all former Ministers, two of them at Cabinet level. They just needed Farron out of the way. And now, they have got him out of the way, even though he did quite well at the General Election. They have an efficiency of which the likes of Yvette Cooper cannot even dream.
For good or ill, those are all former Ministers, two of them at Cabinet level. They just needed Farron out of the way. And now, they have got him out of the way, even though he did quite well at the General Election. They have an efficiency of which the likes of Yvette Cooper cannot even dream.
But then, we already knew that. The Lib Dems knifed the far more impressive Charles Kennedy (a totally pro-life Catholic, by the way), and they would have had no difficulty knifing Farron. Indeed, they did have no difficulty knifing Farron.
Remember that his views would have disqualified him from even contesting the Leadership of the Conservative Party, still less winning it.
And so to the DUP.
The problem with the DUP is not that its MPs hold the same views on abortion and on same-sex marriage as at least one MP who nominated Jeremy Corbyn for Leader, as at least one Campaign Group MP who stood down in 2010 having been John McDonnell's campaign manager, and as at least one active Corbyn supporter who has recently returned to his previous role as a stalwart of the Labour Left in the House of Commons.
No, the problem is the Ulster Resistance, which has never disbanded, with at least seven brigades or divisions still active in Northern Ireland, with at least one support brigade still active in Britain, and with the daughter of one of the Paris Three now the MP for Belfast South.
The story of the Paris Three has it all where the Far Right of yesteryear is concerned. Some of the detritus of all of that is now in Cabinet, in one case ostentatiously reappointed to it. Some holds the balance of power. And some committed, one year ago today, the only murder of a sitting MP in the present century.
More profoundly, the problem is a part of the United Kingdom that can give 10 parliamentary seats to an outfit such as that, and seven of its remaining eight seats to Sinn Féin.
If they persisted in such voting habits in what is now the age of hung Parliaments as the norm, then the people of Northern Ireland would need to be confronted with the question, entirely regardless of whether or not the Republic would take them, of how much longer they expected the voters of Great Britain to keep them on.
Self-determination is a two-way street.
More profoundly, the problem is a part of the United Kingdom that can give 10 parliamentary seats to an outfit such as that, and seven of its remaining eight seats to Sinn Féin.
If they persisted in such voting habits in what is now the age of hung Parliaments as the norm, then the people of Northern Ireland would need to be confronted with the question, entirely regardless of whether or not the Republic would take them, of how much longer they expected the voters of Great Britain to keep them on.
Self-determination is a two-way street.
Interesting to see Leadsom out and about today. As you say, "Farron's views would have disqualified him from even contesting the Leadership of the Conservative Party, still less winning it." In its present form that party was founded by David Cameron when he introduced same sex marriage. By that means he created an entirely new party and the point of it is same sex marriage. It's in government now but a deal with the DUP is easily enough to bring it down once people look into the Ulster Resistance, especially once they join the dots to the world of Thomas Mair.
ReplyDeleteThey do not need the DUP, via the Ulster Resistance, for that, although I suppose that it will do.
DeleteNational Fronts come and BNPs go, EDLs come and Britain Firsts go, but certain institutional and organisational manifestations of the Far Right are perennial, hitherto even permanent. Thomas Mair’s is the Springbok Club, which is run by the people who also run the London Swinton Circle. And that, in turn, was addressed by Liam Fox (born 1961) and by Owen Paterson (born 1956) as recently as 2014.
Ah, those old 1980s Tory Boys, in their Hang Mandela T-shirts and all the rest of it. Wherever did they all end up?
In the Thatcher and, to a lesser extent, Major years, there were Ministers who were members of the Western Goals Institute or the Monday Club. Those crossed over, via such things as the League of Saint George, to overt neo-Nazism on the Continent, to the Ku Klux Klan, to apartheid South Africa, to Ian Smith’s Rhodesia, to the juntas of Latin America, to Marcos and Suharto, to the Duvaliers, and so on.
Nick Griffin’s father, Edgar, was a Vice-President of Iain Duncan Smith’s Leadership Campaign. He answered what was listed as one of its official telephone numbers (in his house) with the words “British National Party”.
The days of treating even support for the NHS as Loony Leftism, while maintaining no right flank whatever on the officially designated political mainstream, are well and truly over. The dominoes have already started to fall. Some highly prominent people in what incredibly still thinks that it is now this country’s perpetual party of government need to be very, very, very afraid.