Leading Ladies

Fight on, Angela Rayner and Emily Thornberry. You are fighting for a lot of us.

I have never been any kind of Marxist. Until the infamous abstention on the Welfare Bill, I advocated only a second preference vote for Jeremy Corbyn, with a first preference vote for Andy Burnham. I always supported Tom Watson for Deputy Leader, and I still do; when Angela Rayner becomes Leader, then the balance that Jeremy and Tom provide each other would most obviously be provided by Angela and by my old university drinking companion, Jonathan Ashworth.

I am not a member of Momentum, although I do advocate joining it, along with the Labour Party and the Co-operative Party. I am a member of the Fabian Society, and I was recently a candidate, albeit an unsuccessful one, for its Executive Committee. Progress still sends me its magazine, so I must still be on its books somehow. I have had links to Blue Labour for as long as it has existed, to such an extent that John Milbank wrote the preface to my first book, while he and Maurice Glasman wrote commendations of my second. I regret that its Nottingham conferences are no longer held.

Although I am not in any ideological sense a Zionist, and although I am extremely critical of the present Israeli Government, of Israel's anti-British terrorist origins, of Israel's atrocity against the USS Liberty, of Israel's arming of Argentina during the Falklands War, and of Israel's persistent interference in the internal affairs of the Conservative and Labour Parties, I am wholly resigned to the simple existence of the State of Israel, dating as it does from the same year as the Empire Windrush, and I am only a qualified supporter of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, in that academic and cultural boycotts strike me as contrary to the nature of scholarship, art and science, while sporting boycotts seem cruel to very young people whose chance to compete at a certain level may come only once or twice in a lifetime. 

There are a lot of us about.