The Big Three-Oh

Think of a sum of money so small that you could afford to lose 30 times that much. Then please consider donating it for each of the following with which you agreed, in order to help to put me into the House of Commons for the area where I have lived since before I started school. There is going to be another hung Parliament, so one MP could make all the difference:

A Local, Experienced, Inclusive Candidate

Practical Policies

Traditional Values

A Local, Experienced, Inclusive Candidate

1. I was born in 1977, and I have lived in North West Durham since 1982. I never went to school anywhere else, and I went to university at Durham. I was an elected member of Lanchester Parish Council from 1999 to 2013, a governor (including a time as Vice Chair) of Lanchester Endowed Parochial Primary School from 1999 to 2007, and a governor of Saint Bede’s from 2000 to 2008. I am currently one of Derwentside’s elected public governors of County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust; to the best of my knowledge, I am the only person ever to have been elected to that Council of Governors unopposed. I have had several periods of involvement with Willow Burn Hospice over the last 25 years. I am both a product and a feature of the political pluralism of North West Durham, where Labour holds fewer than half of the County Council seats, where the Conservative parliamentary candidate won 34 per cent of the vote last year, where the Liberal Democrat candidate cut the Labour majority in half in 2010, and where an Independent kept his deposit both in 2005 and in 2010. Wear Valley was controlled for a time by the Liberal Democrats, who remained numerous on it until its abolition. Derwentside was in practice controlled by an alliance between the Independents and that section of the local Labour Party which now supports my parliamentary candidacy; its Leader from that time, Councillor Alex Watson OBE, is one of my Campaign Patrons. My other Campaign Patron is Davey Ayre, a legendary local trade unionist. 

2. I would appoint an Independent, a Labourite, a Conservative and a Liberal Democrat in each of the County Wards, ideally including at least one person in each of the former District Wards, to work with me and with local people. I would also appoint a Policy Advisor from within each of the Independent, Labour, Conservative, and Liberal Democrat blocs, and I hereby offer first refusal on that Labour position to my old comrade Neil Fleming, who is now living here again after his time as Head of Press and Broadcasting for the Labour Party and as its London Regional Director. The price of my support for any Government in the coming hung Parliament would be the necessary support for a number of projects in each of the former District Wards equal to the former number of District Councillors, together with justice for the 472 Teaching Assistants whose pay Durham County Council had cut by 23 per cent, and together with the implementation of the plan for the rail service in the North of England that was recently advanced by well over 20 local and regional newspapers, most of which have never supported Labour, and only one of which did so last year. And yes, I do mean the price of my support for any Government. Even a Government that was headed by Jeremy Corbyn, whom I broadly, but not uncritically, support. Two of the three such projects in Lanchester would be the restoration of the full bus service and the construction of adequate flood defences, while one in Weardale would be the saving of the Sixth Form at Wolsingham. The present MP for North West Durham has appointed as her Political Advisor the man whose political advice led the Teaching Assistants to their present predicament.

3. I am now working with all of the non-Labour members of Durham County Council and with the trade unions, to bring Volkswagen’s production for the British market to County Durham after, or even before, Brexit. I am more than open to further suggestions along similar lines. Among many other things, this project will guarantee the financial future of the Durham Miners’ Gala and of the Durham Miners’ Hall. The absence of the County Council Labour Group is that Group’s own sorry fault. I unreservedly condemn the decision of that Group to award to the Kier Group, with its history of blacklisting, the contract to build the new headquarters of Durham County Council.

4. I strongly support the exploitation of the vast reserves of coal in this country and in this county. That, and the extension of civil nuclear power, are the means of delivering highly paid, highly skilled, high status, unionised jobs while securing independence from Arab oil, from Russian gas, and from coal that has been mined using child and slave labour. From North Korea, Donald Trump intends his dynasty to supply a dependent world with the coal of the Kim dynasty deep into the twenty-second century. Yet we have our own, right here under our feet. Horror stories about how coal was burned or mined in the Britain of the twentieth century have no relevance to the Britain of the twenty-first. At the same time, I am totally opposed to the open-casting of the Pont Valley or anywhere else, digging up hardly any coal while employing hardly anyone. On those same grounds, I am also totally opposed to fracking.

5. I would co-operate with people of all parties and none, in order to implement Theresa May’s original Prime Ministerial agenda of workers’ and consumers’ representation in corporate governance, of shareholders’ control over executive pay, of restrictions on pay differentials within companies, of an investment-based Industrial Strategy and infrastructure programme, of greatly increased housebuilding, of action against tax avoidance, of a ban on public contracts for tax-avoiding companies, of a cap on energy prices, of banning or greatly restricting foreign takeovers, of a ban on unpaid internships, and of an inquiry into Orgreave, while returning to her world-leading record of work against human trafficking and modern slavery, not least now that slavery has returned to Libya.

6. As the Member of Parliament for North West Durham, my Westminster office would be a global centre for the broadly based opposition and alternative to neoliberal economic policy and to neoconservative foreign policy, strongly asserting that that opposition and that alternative were the real centre ground. My candidacy is already endorsed by Dr Philip M. Giraldi, Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, Washington, D.C.; former CIA counterterrorism specialist and military intelligence officer; and foreign policy advisor to the 2008 Presidential campaign of Ron Paul. It also endorsed by Dr Leon Hadar of Chevy Chase, Maryland, and of Tel Aviv, Israel; Contributing Editor of The American Conservative; Commentator, Quillette; Washington Correspondent and Columnist, The Business Times, Singapore; and foreign policy advisor to the 2008 Presidential campaign of Ron Paul.

Practical Policies

7. In central and local government until 1979, the Conservatives used to take housing at least as seriously as anyone else did. But since 1997, even Labour in government has failed miserably on this issue. We need a minimum of 100,000 new homes every year for at least 10 years, including council homes with an end to the Right to Buy, with the capital receipts from council house sales released in order to build more council housing, and with councils empowered to borrow to that end. We need a minimum of 50 per cent of any new development to be dedicated to affordable housing, with affordability defined as 50 per cent of average rents. We need rent controls. We need action against the buying up of property by foreign investors in order to leave it empty. And we need a statutory requirement of planning permission for change of use if it were proposed to turn a primary dwelling into a secondary dwelling, a working family home into a weekend or holiday home. That would set the pattern for the empowerment of the rural working class, assisted both by the Land Value Tax and by a windfall tax on the supermarkets in order to fund agriculture and small business, with strict regulation to ensure that the costs of this were not passed on to suppliers, workers, consumers, communities, or the environment. 

8. Like the huge majority of the population across all political allegiances, and like so conservative a figure as Peter Hitchens of the Mail on Sunday, I support the renationalisation of the rail services as each franchise came up for renewal, and thus at no cost. I would make that the backbone of a rebuilt network of public transport, eventually free at the point of use, and extending to every village in this or any other constituency. Even prior to that, I would require the approval of the House of Commons for any increase in public transport fares, with the cost of HS2 diverted to reconnecting many towns to the rail network. That would include several towns in North West Durham. I was the first person ever to suggest that the trade unions develop an app in competition with Uber, and that is now developing well in the form of CabFair, an example of the key role of the unions in the mutualisation of the gig economy. Being disabled, I am dependent on public transport. I appreciate that a Member of Parliament for a rural constituency could never be entirely so, no matter how good that transport was, so I would create employment in North West Durham by employing one or more drivers. Vehicle Excise Duty does not really raise very much money at all, but it colours the debate on transport, so it ought to be abolished.

9. Privatised utilities are a racket. The same product, via the same wires or pipes, cannot possibly cost different amounts from different companies. Never mind from the same company, but on different tariffs. The utilities are currently delivered by cartels of pretend-competitors, instead of being where they belong, in public ownership. No one can claim to be patriotic or conservative while supporting the ownership of key parts of our national infrastructure by foreign states as such, and that is the result of privatisation. The “Royal” in “Royal Mail” now refers to the Emir of Kuwait, and the larceny of the Royal Mail cries out for a criminal investigation. As one benefit of a return to public ownership, I would insist on a National Grid for water. As another, I would insist on the requirement of the approval of the House of Commons before energy or water prices could be increased.

10. The creation of the National Health Service was in all three of the Labour, Conservative and Liberal manifestos in 1945. Even Margaret Thatcher barely touched it. It took New Labour and the Coalition to privatise much of it, and to grind down the rest with a view to a cheap sale, a process that is still very much ongoing. Instead of that, I support the enactment of the NHS Reinstatement Bill, the abolition of prescription charges throughout the United Kingdom, the abolition of eye and dental charges throughout the United Kingdom, the abolition of hospital car parking charges throughout the United Kingdom, the extra £350 million per week that was promised after Brexit, the diversion of funds to the ethically unproblematic research on adult and cord blood stem cells that is delivering the goods in spite of criminal neglect, and the invitation of the Cuban medical missions to make up for the running down of the National Health Service, beginning in the two STP areas that cover County Durham. The Fifth of July, which is the anniversary of the creation of the National Health Service, ought to be the United Kingdom’s National Day, and it ought to be marked as fulsomely as the United States marked the Fourth of July.

11. The National Education Service proposed by Jeremy Corbyn and Angela Rayner is, with the Build It In Britain programme, the National Investment Bank, the Regional Development Banks, and the Universal Basic Income, pretty much my dream policy. In Rayner’s inspiring words, “The sum of human knowledge is the fruit of thousands of years of human labour. The discoveries of maths and science; the great works of literature and art; the arc of human and natural history itself; and so much more that there is to learn. All of it should be our common inheritance. Because knowledge belongs to the many, not the few. This is our historic purpose as a movement. Not just to be a voice for the voiceless. But to give them a voice of their own.” Within that, I would work with all my might to ensure that apprentices and trainees enjoyed the same benefits as were enjoyed by their peers in further and higher education, and vice versa, while promoting the understanding that we either funded higher education all the way up to doctoral level or we charged fees at every stage (with a very strong preference for the former), and while guaranteeing that the training and other standards for the private sector to match were set by national and municipal public ownership, itself reformed towards greater democracy and accountability.

12. The condition of a commercial school’s continuing charitable status should be its having been adjudged good or better by Ofsted, using the same criteria as for state schools, with the reports published, and with the value-added measure applied, thereby requiring those schools to have demonstrated how they had improved pupils’ abilities. At the same time, I fully recognise that those schools regularly provide left-wing figures with a platform that they are seldom or never afforded by the schools that are under the direct or indirect control of the municipal Labour Right. The Left and the working class, and perhaps especially the rural working class, need to bypass both the municipal Labour Right and the Liberal Establishment both in education and in the media. The EU referendum result has confirmed that the workers, and not the liberal bourgeoisie, are now the key swing voters who deserve direct representation on local public bodies, on national public bodies, in the media, and at the intersection of the public and media sectors in the Parliamentary Lobby, in the BBC, in any future structure of the Channel Four Television Corporation, and in any arrangement that made possible Rupert Murdoch’s or anyone else’s acquisition of the whole of Sky News. I do not understand why people have fits of the vapours about Murdoch, as if any of the rest of them were any better. 

13. This is one of the areas the votes of which decided the EU referendum. We voted to reject 39 years of failure under all three parties, going all the way back to the adoption of monetarism by the Callaghan Government in 1977, the year of my birth. Brexit needs to meet our needs, which are not for chasing after the unicorns of the “Anglosphere” (what were once the Dominions have moved on, and anti-British protectionism is America’s historical norm), but for trade deals with the BRICS countries even while remaining thoroughly critical of their present governments, for integration into the Belt and Road Initiative, for full enjoyment of our freedom from the Single Market’s bans on such measures as State Aid and capital controls, for an extra £350 million per week for the National Health Service, and for the restoration of the United Kingdom’s historic fishing rights in accordance with international law: 200 miles, or to the median line. The Government’s proposals represent the only thing worse than staying in the EU, namely becoming a rule-taker but not a rule-maker, and paying while having no say, so that Britain would be reduced to a colony and a satrapy. In a referendum between that and Remain, then even Remain would be preferable. But the key is to stop matters from ever making it that far. I am by no means opposed in principle to trade deals with the United States, Canada, Australia or New Zealand, but the National Health Service and food safety standards are among the things that are simply not negotiable.

14. I would insist on the specification in the Statute Law that the United Kingdom’s aid to any given country be reduced by the exact cost of any space programme, or of any nuclear weapons programme, or of any nuclear submarine programme, or of any foreign aid budget of that country’s own, but with the money thus saved remaining within the budget of the Department for International Development, and with the 0.7 per cent target still resolutely intact.

15. As the Member of Parliament for North West Durham, my Westminster office would be an international centre for Modern Monetary Theory. The right-wing question is perfectly necessary in itself: where is the money for left-wing projects expected to come from? Modern Monetary Theory answers that question. Through its Jobs Guarantee, Modern Monetary Theory provides a way of preserving the bargaining power of the trade unions, through full employment with the Living Wage, while progressing to the Universal Basic Income that is increasingly favoured across the political spectrum. I warmly welcome the additional billion pound investment in jobs and services in Northern Ireland, and I would insist that Scotland, Wales, and each of the nine English regions receive the same per capita as part of the application of Modern Monetary Theory, including the Land Value Tax. I support the integration into the Belt and Road Initiative of all four parts of the United Kingdom, of all nine English regions, of all of the Crown Dependencies, and of all of the British Overseas Territories. In some way, all 99 lieutenancy areas, including County Durham, need to be so integrated, and need to receive such additional investment.

16. I would demand the reassertion of democratic political control over the Bank of England, including that the approval of the House of Commons be required for changes to interest rates, and I would demand the assertion of democratic political control over the City of London, with a Glass-Steagall division between investment banking and retail banking. I would close all tax havens under British jurisdiction, since they have the option of independence if they did not like it. The entire concept of non-domiciled tax status must be abolished. As a member of the House of Commons, I would campaign most actively for supporters of economic equality to be elected to the City of London Corporation, to the States of Jersey, to the States of Guernsey, to Tynwald, and to the legislatures of the British Overseas Territories. Rather than taxing income from work at a higher rate than income from share dividends or from capital gains, all income must be taxed on the same basis, as was the case under Margaret Thatcher. Employment rights must begin with employment, and apply regardless of the number of hours worked, as was promised by John Smith, but as was never implemented by New Labour.

17. I would replace the House of Lords with a Senate based on the 99 lieutenancy areas, including County Durham. Each of us would vote for one candidate, and the top six would be elected, giving 594 Senators in all, serving for six years. I would transfer all non-ceremonial exercises of the Royal Prerogative, including Royal Assent, to six, seven, eight or nine of nine Co-Presidents, with each of us voting for one candidate, and with the top nine elected to hold office for eight years. The term of office of the House of Commons ought to go back down to four years. If the number of Commons constituencies were indeed to be reduced to 600, then the number of MPs might nevertheless remain the same. The whole country should elect 50 MPs, with each of us voting for one candidate, and with the top 50 elected at the end. The House of Commons would revert to a four-year term. While the House of Lords exists, however, I actively encourage applications to its Appointments Commission, and the acceptance of offers of peerages, because even if our people did not take seats on the red benches, someone else would.

18. There must be no British military intervention except in a specific British national interest and with the approval of the House of Commons. We need an end to this country’s poisonous relationship with Saudi Arabia and with the other Gulf monarchies. We need withdrawal from NATO, which commits us to the defence of Turkish Islamists and of Eastern European neo-Nazis while charging us two per cent of our Gross Domestic Product for the privilege. We need bilateral peace treaties with all other European countries including Russia, we need bilateral peace treaties with the United States and with Canada, and we need peace treaties with the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and with the Collective Security Treaty Organisation. There must be no foreign military bases on British soil.

19. We need the renationalisation of BAE Systems as the monopoly supplier to our own Armed Forces, with a ban on all sale of arms abroad, and with a comprehensive programme of diversification in order to preserve the skills that were currently employed in the arms industry. We need the cancellation of Trident in favour of rebuilding the conventional Armed Forces, in favour of care for veterans, in favour of flood defences, and in favour of an “all of the above” energy policy based around civil nuclear power and around this country’s vast reserves of coal, with the commanding heights in reformed public ownership, with no need for fracking even in its own terms, and with the requirement of the approval of the House of Commons before energy or water prices could be increased. In the case of Trident, we could pay the affected shipyard workers quite eye-watering sums in compensation, and still save amounts that there were scarcely the adjectives to describe.

20. I am not a member of the same political party as Tony Blair, and in fact I am actively pursuing a complaint to the Police about him in relation to his complicity in torture, which was recently exposed by the Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament. A Chambers and Partners Band 1 legal practice is now on standby to pursue an action to bring about a Coroner’s Inquest into the death of Dr David Kelly, an action before the International Criminal Court against those who had brought slavery back to Libya, and an action before the High Court of Justiciary of Scotland inviting it to exercise its declaratory power against Tony Blair and his accomplices in the aggression against Iraq in 2003. All of these actions are to begin immediately upon my election to the House of Commons. As are the actions to bring about a Coroner’s Inquest into the death of Dawn Sturgess, and to challenge the legality of the recent bombing of Syria after the confirmation by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons that no nerve agent had been used at Douma. The present British funding of the White Helmets and of the “Free Syrian Police” must be diverted to our own emergency services.

Traditional Values 

21. I reject the ludicrous theory of gender self-identification, and I will fight to my last breath to defend women-only spaces. I seek to rescue such issues as male suicide, men’s health, and fathers’ rights from those whose economic and other policies have caused the problems in the first place. As a mixed-race person, I refuse to recognise racists, Fascists or opportunists as the authentic voices of the accepted need to control immigration, a problem that has arisen as a result of the weakening of trade unions. I deny the anti-racist credentials of the present MP for North West Durham, who has failed to move that Anne Marie Morris be expelled from the House of Commons for using language that would now be career-ending in South Africa or in the Southern United States.

22. We need an approach to climate change which protected and extended secure employment with civilised wages and working conditions, which encouraged economic development around the world, which upheld the right of the working classes and of nonwhite people to have children, which held down and as far as practicable reduced the fuel prices that always hit the poor hardest, and which refused to restrict travel opportunities or a full diet to the rich. I reject out of hand the notion that the problem with the world is that it has people in it. Instead, we must celebrate the full compatibility between the highest view of human demographic, economic, intellectual and cultural expansion and development, and the most active concern for the conservation of the natural world and of the treasures bequeathed by such expansion and development in the past. That expansion and development must now include space exploration, perhaps fuelled by, and fuelling, fusion power.

23. I have spent more than 20 years, since I was just about still in my teens and had never seen the Internet, trying to get the story out about Harriet Harman and the Paedophile Information Exchange. I have paid a terrible journalistic and political price for it, but I have no regrets. Media that always knew about it simply ignored the whole thing, banning me from their websites and what have you, until a period of no more than two weeks when they needed to distract attention from Patrick Rock. Normal service was rapidly resumed, and it has continued ever since. No one has done more on this issue than I have. No one. And now, the plan is advancing to make Harman the next Speaker of the House of Commons. Not only would I oppose her election, but, were she already in post, then I would oppose her re-election at the start of the next Parliament. As I have been proved right about Harman and the Paedophile Information Exchange, so I am being proved right about the rise of the Far Right. These matters are not unconnected. For example, we are enduring the rehabilitation of Toby Young, who is a eugenicist of international importance, who is also a self-confessed sexual assailant and supplier of Class A drugs, and whose involvement in eugenics has made him an associate of Emil Kirkegaard, himself an advocate of the rape of drugged children. Like Kirkegaard, Young is a a stalwart of the world of the London Conference on Intelligence, the Ulster Institute for Social Research and the Mankind Quarterly, yet he was given a loud voice in education policy for many years, a major formal role in education was about to have been given to him, and he is even now being brought back into public life. I was proved right about Harman, and I am being proved right again.

24. “Nutrition” is just a Latin way of saying “food”, and “hydration” is just a Greek way of saying “water”. The withdrawal of food and water is not the withdrawal of medical treatment. It is the intentional killing of that person. Parliament needs to legislate in order to make that clear. My commitment to palliative care and to the hospice movement is absolute. I would also give the highest priority to the diversion of funds to the ethically unproblematic research on adult and cord blood stem cells that is delivering the goods in spite of criminal neglect.

25. We need to ban Fixed Odds Betting Terminals, to empower local authorities to limit the number of gambling venues, to insist on the use of that power, to end gambling on television, to end the advertising of gambling other than at venues such as casinos and betting shops, and to ban gambling with credit cards. And we need a single category of illegal drug, with a crackdown on the possession of drugs, including a mandatory sentence of three months for a second offence, six months for a third offence, one year for a fourth offence, and so on. Most certainly, that must include cannabis, which is linked to violent psychosis, and any medicinal properties of which are no more applied by smoking a spliff than those of opium would be by injecting heroin, or than those of aspirin would be by ingesting bark. I have never taken any illegal drug. Radical change would be impossible if the workers, the youth and the poor were in a state of stupefaction, and that baleful situation, which has been contrived in the past, is being contrived again today.

26. Families need fathers. All aspects of public policy must take account of the urgent social and cultural need for highly paid, highly skilled, high status employment, which only the State can ever guarantee and which only the State can very often deliver, as the economic basis of the paternal authority, and thus of the paternal responsibility, that needs to be reasserted in relation to the key points of childhood and adolescence. We need a legal presumption of equal parenting. We need the restoration of the tax allowance for fathers for so long as Child Benefit was being paid to mothers. We need the restoration of the requirement that providers of fertility treatment take account of the child’s need for a father. We need to repeal of the ludicrous provision for two persons of the same sex to be listed as a child’s parents on a birth certificate. We need paternity leave to be made available up to a set maximum at any time until the child was 18 or left school. And we need a foreign policy that did not entail tearing fathers away from their children in order to harvest them in wars.

27. We need to give any marrying couple the right to register their marriage as bound by the law prior to 1969 with regard to grounds and procedures for divorce, and any religious organisation the right to specify that any marriage that it conducted would be so bound, requiring it to counsel couples accordingly. We need to fix entitlement upon divorce by Statute at one per cent of the other party’s estate for each year of marriage (up to 50 per cent), with no entitlement for the petitioning party unless the other party’s fault were proved. And we need to give opposite-sex couples the right to contract civil partnerships, removing the restriction of civil partnerships to unrelated couples.

28. We need to halt and reverse the proliferation of lap-dancing clubs, and we need to apply the technology that is already used for age verification in order to block pornographic websites altogether. We need to make it a criminal offence for anyone aged 21 or over to buy or sell sex, with equal sentencing on both sides. We need to define obscenity as material depicting acts that were themselves illegal or which was reasonably likely to incite or encourage such acts, with sentencing the same as for the illegal act in question in each case. We need a criminal offence of sexual activity with any person under the age of 18 who was more than two years younger than oneself, with a maximum sentence equal to twice the difference in age, abolition of different rules for “positions of trust” and for one sex rather than the other, a ban on abortion or contraception for those under 18 without parental knowledge and consent, and the application of the law on indecent images equally to boys and to girls. We need the removal of any financial liability of male victims for pregnancies resulting from their sexual abuse unless they decided as adults to seek to make contact with their children. We need the replacement of the existing categories of sexual assault with aggravating circumstances to the general categories of offences against the person such that the sentences could be doubled. There must be no anonymity either for adult defendants or for adult complainants. We need to reverse even the existing reversal of the burden of proof, rule out the legal possibility of being a specifically sexual assailant below the age of consent, and specify that intoxication was a bar to sexual consent only insofar as it would have been a bar to driving. We need to outlaw American-style internally administered “balance of probabilities” or “preponderance of evidence” tests to sexual assault allegations at universities or elsewhere, outlaw extradition to face charges that fell short of these standards, and exclude such convictions from any legal standing in this country. And we need to end the practice whereby the Police and others blocked people’s progress into paid or voluntary work, even though they had been acquitted, by suggesting that they might have been guilty after all.

29. We need to reverse the erosion of trial by jury and of the right to silence, and we need to reverse the existing reversals of the burden of proof. We need the abolition of conviction by majority verdict, which, by definition, provides for conviction even where there is reasonable doubt. We need the extension throughout the United Kingdom of the Scots Law requirement for corroborating evidence. We need to require that the prosecution present its case within 12 weeks of charge, or else that case be dismissed. We need the abolition of the Crown Prosecution Service, so that the decision as to whether or not to charge should be made the Police, while any high street firm of solicitors would have a partner whose specialisms included prosecution, with such work built into the firm’s ordinary caseload. We need the restoration of the pre-1968 committal powers of the magistracy. We need the abolition of the admission of anonymous evidence other than from undercover Police Officers. We need the exclusion of the possibility of conviction on anonymous evidence alone. We need the restoration of the provision that no acquitted person should ever have to stand trial again for the same offence, since the previous change to this has now done its job in the Stephen Lawrence case. We need an end to the secrecy of the family courts. We need the exclusion of identity cards or any thought of them, and the exclusion of control orders or anything like them. We need the abolition of Police confiscation of assets without a conviction. We need the abolition of stipendiary magistrates sitting alone. We need the repeal of the Civil Contingencies Act, the repeal of the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Act, and the repeal of the Official Secrets Acts. We need the repeal of one-sided extradition arrangements. We need the repeal of the provision for “no win, no fee” litigation. We need the restoration and extension of Legal Aid. We need the enactment of the current judicially imposed arrangement on privacy into the Statute Law, with the placing of the burden of proof in libel actions onto the plaintiff, and with the extension of Legal Aid to defamation actions. We need a return to preventative policing based on foot patrols, with Police Forces at least no larger than at present, and with the restoration of the network of police stations and police houses that placed the Police at the very heart of their communities. And we need the disbandment of MI5 in favour Police Officers who, while highly specialised, were nevertheless part of accountable community policing. 

30. I am actively involved in campaigns for truth and justice as various, and yet as inseparable from each other, as Hillsborough, Shrewsbury, Orgreave, Grenfell Tower, blacklisting, spycops, Farepak, Remploy, the Mineworkers’ Pension Scheme, George Bell, Julian Assange, the Miami Showband massacre, the Marikana massacre, support for the Dalits, support for the Rohingya and other minorities in Myanmar, support for the Chagossians, support for Abdullah Öcalan and the wider Kurdish cause, support for the deportation of Altaf Hussain to Pakistan, support for an inquiry into the role of the Thatcher Government in the 1984 storming of the Golden Temple and in the events surrounding it, support for the Dorje Shugden practitioners who are being persecuted by the Dalai Lama, support for the Russian and other ethnic minorities who are oppressed in the Baltic States, support for the ancient indigenous Christians of the Middle East and North Africa (and not least of the Holy Land), support for those in Israel who are opposed to the apartheid Nation-State Law, support for British Jews who do not identify as Zionists primarily or at all, support for the Jews and Zoroastrians of Iran, and the translation into English and the publication in the United Kingdom of Hernán Dobry’s Operation Israel: The Rearming of Argentina During the Dictatorship, 1976-1983. As the Member of Parliament for North West Durham, I would board a plane to Tehran and simply refuse to leave without Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and Abbas Edalat. My Westminster office would be a global centre for the coordination of these and numerous other campaigns for truth and justice at home and abroad.

I need £10,000 in order to stand for Parliament with any chance of winning. My crowdfunding page is here, or email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com for other options. That address accepts PayPal.