Tuesday, 30 April 2019

Healthy Discharge Watch: Day Seven

It has now been more than three weeks since the jury in my trial, the third attempt at one, was discharged.

The previous day, the star prosecution witness had been sent away to come up with the only piece of evidence, a single email that no one had ever asked to see until then.

As soon as they did, then he never reappeared on his video link from the United States, and the jury was discharged.

Three weeks later, that email, a perfectly simple thing to find, has still not turned up. It does not exist.

It is no wonder that we longer have even so much as a date for a Case Management Hearing, still less for a trial. There is no case against me. None.

But this post will appear every day until further notice.

Beyond that, another hung Parliament is coming, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it.

It has become a local commonplace that I am on 30-30-30 with Labour and the Conservatives here at North West Durham, so that any one of us could be the First Past the Post.

I will stand for this seat, if I can raise the £10,000 necessary to mount a serious campaign. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

Schoolgirl's Record of Achievement Watch: Day Seven

It is now more than two years since the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party effectively abolished the Constituency Labour Party in North West Durham by denying it any role in the selection of its parliamentary candidate. It then imposed a 29-year-old who had never set foot here, and of whom next to no one here had ever heard.

Soon afterwards, she lost her seat on Northumberland County Council. I was present when she received that news, at the count for Durham County Council, where she was being introduced as the all-done-and-dusted Prospective Parliamentary Candidate to stalwarts who did not even know her name, but several of whom had already bought me drinks.

For some years by then, certain of them had been introducing me at funerals as, "The man who should have been our MP." Everyone does that now, and there no longer even needs to have been a death. They also call me "Speedboat", as in, "Here's what you could have won."

But I am a generous old soul. So I invite in the comments specific examples of the achievements of Laura Pidcock MP. This post will appear daily until the second anniversary of the 2017 General Election.

Beyond that, another hung Parliament is coming, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it. It has become a local commonplace that I am on 30-30-30 with Labour and the Conservatives here at North West Durham, so that any one of us could be the First Past the Post. I will stand for this seat, if I can raise the £10,000 necessary to mount a serious campaign. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

No Longer In Deep

What really shocks the Americans about Britain's attitude to Huawei is that we just don't care. And if we don't, then who will?

The American liberal Deep State had expected Californian hegemony forever, with permanent control of the means of communication by the American liberal Deep State. Well, it isn't working out like that.

Spied on by the Chinese? We are already being spied on all the time by you. Or did you think we didn't know?

Come to that, the Chinese are already spying on us in other ways, too. Hey, ho. There we go.

And as for the Five Eyes, the world is changing and we no longer need to live on your scraps while feeding you everything we have.

Of course, there are still forces in Britain that will never accept any of this. Most Labour MPs, for a start.

Another hung Parliament is coming, however, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it.

It has become a local commonplace that I am on 30-30-30 with Labour and the Conservatives here at North West Durham, so that any one of us could be the First Past the Post.

I will stand for this seat, if I can raise the £10,000 necessary to mount a serious campaign. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

Encounter

Imagine, if you will, that John McDonnell had given an interview to the Daily Mail. What might he have expected to have been the result? Well, Roger Scruton gave an interview to the New Statesman. What did he expect to be the result?

The Government set him up, of course. It knew that if it gave him any kind of position, then someone would take him down, thereby taking down criticism of George Soros, of neoliberal economic policy, of extreme identitarian social policy, and of neoconservative foreign policy. Such criticism, at least of the second and fourth parts and thus in effect of the whole package, exists barely, if at all, in or around the Conservative Party, while almost no one in or around that party has ever heard of Soros. But the Conservative Party was not the intended audience here.

The people who are now running the Labour Party, which is regularly well ahead of the Conservatives in the polls, are as critical as it is possible to be of neoliberalism and of neoconservatism. They come from the tradition with the longest and the most consistent record of at least profound ambivalence about the identity politics towards which much of Jeremy Corbyn's personal base is vigorously hostile, not shying away from pointing out the sources of the money. And one such source does rather stand out.

The Government is betting that anyone who might wish to express these views has been cowed into silence by the fall of Roger Scruton. The same hope is held in Change UK, such as it is, and in its much larger and more dangerous stay-behind network in and around the Parliamentary Labour Party. Well, dream on.

Scruton, by the way, is a complete outlier. For one thing, he is not only an academic, but a philosopher, rather than either a roaringly unbookish country squire or impersonator of such, or a net curtain twitcher whose only book in the house is Regimental Cap Badges of the British Army or some heavily illustrated hagiography of the Queen.

Moreover, Scruton is a British conservative intellectual who might actually be in, or at least vote for, a conservative rather than a liberal party on the Continent. That is almost unheard of. Usually, they are like Oliver Letwin, or David Willetts, or Nick Boles, in a tradition that goes all the way back to Burke, who was, after all, a Whig, a critic of the French Revolution only really in practice, and a supporter of the American Revolution at least in principle.

Now, Scruton is not Joseph de Maistre, or Charles Maurras, or Juan Donoso Cortés, or Klemens Wenzel von Metternich. He is not even where those thinkers' successors, who certainly do exist, are today. But he is that occasional curiosity, an English writer with at least some affinity with any of that. Yet even then, he is peculiar. He has a straightforwardly English background, he not only went to Oxbridge but thrived there, he is attached to the middle-of-the-road Church of England, and he has at least some sort of association with the Conservative Party.

By contrast, figures in roughly his position on the periphery of our national life have been at least one of basically foreign, academically undistinguished in any formal sense and so mostly self-taught, either fiercely Catholic (but not either Recusant or Irish) or on the extreme Anglo-Catholic fringe, and possessed of an utter contempt of the nominally Tory political project, sometimes to the point of not voting as a matter of principle.

Anyway, the Government knew that if it gave Scruton any kind of position, then someone would take him down, thereby taking down criticism of George Soros, of neoliberal economic policy, of extreme identitarian social policy, and of neoconservative foreign policy. It is betting that anyone who might wish to express those views has been cowed into silence by the fall of Roger Scruton. The same hope is held in Change UK, such as it is, and in its much larger and more dangerous stay-behind network in and around the Parliamentary Labour Party. Well, dream on.

Dream on, because another hung Parliament is coming, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it. It has become a local commonplace that I am on 30-30-30 with Labour and the Conservatives here at North West Durham, so that any one of us could be the First Past the Post. I will stand for this seat, if I can raise the £10,000 necessary to mount a serious campaign. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

"Falsely Nostalgic"?

No one seems to have told Daniel Hannan that Britain was about to get a new deep coal mine, by unanimous resolution of Labour, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats on Cumbria County Council. Everyone now accepts that the miners were right. Everyone. Well, everyone apart from Michael Heseltine. Is Hannan pleased to be in that particular company?

Britain did not experience a post-War decline. This country's people were not worse off in the 1970s than they had been in the 1930s. But faced with the idea that anyone might dare to point out that simple fact, a man who knew very little about Britain, but who seemed to have discovered a few writers from the distant past of whom no one else had ever heard and declared them to be the political soul of the place, was practically banging the desk on Newsnight last night.

Hannan's "argument" that foodbanks did not exist 20 years ago, making their growth comparable to that of smartphones, is beneath him. There were things like soup kitchens in the past, until there was no need of them. When the need came back, then so did they. There was nothing remotely comparable to a smartphone between the Wars, or in the 1980s. But there were things very like foodbanks. And now, here we are again.

Hannan grew up between public school and Peru. He was born in 1971, so ask him about the most popular television programmes in Britain in the 1980s. Ask him about the pop music. He couldn't tell you. He thinks that people hate the NHS. At the very least, he wonders why they don't. He knows absolutely nothing about this country.

When it came to economic policy, then a funny little sect of 1970s cranks had thought that everyone else had just given in and conceded that their own weird ideas were the Laws of Physics. But then, for all his many faults, along came Jeremy Corbyn. Something similar is happening among the foreign policy nutters, too.

Only 40 years ago, a single manual wage provided the wage-earner, his wife and their several children with a quality of life unimaginable even on two professional salaries today. This impoverishment has been so rapid and so extreme that most people, including almost all politicians and commentators, simply refuse to acknowledge that it has happened. But it has indeed happened. And it is still going on.

Another hung Parliament is coming, however, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it. It has become a local commonplace that I am on 30-30-30 with Labour and the Conservatives here at North West Durham, so that any one of us could be the First Past the Post. I will stand for this seat, if I can raise the £10,000 necessary to mount a serious campaign. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

Full Disclosure

Are you going to accuse someone of anything, never mind of something that carried a potential sentence of life imprisonment?

If so, then show your face, give your name, and be prepared to have your mobile phone trawled through for anything that might detract from your credibility.

If you are not willing to do that, then do not accuse anyone of anything, still less of something that carried a potential sentence of life imprisonment.

Another hung Parliament is coming, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it.

It has become a local commonplace that I am on 30-30-30 with Labour and the Conservatives here at North West Durham, so that any one of us could be the First Past the Post.

I will stand for this seat, if I can raise the £10,000 necessary to mount a serious campaign. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

Universal Care Entitlement?

I waited all day yesterday for Damian Green's proposal to tax old age to be the main news. As I expected, it never was. This one is coming unless we take very great care indeed.

Also coming, however, is another hung Parliament, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it.

It has become a local commonplace that I am on 30-30-30 with Labour and the Conservatives here at North West Durham, so that any one of us could be the First Past the Post.

I will stand for this seat, if I can raise the £10,000 necessary to mount a serious campaign. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

Some People Are Just Caracas

Listen to Ron Paul and to Pat Buchanan, who are both totally opposed to the coup in Venezuela and to the people both behind it and, in Juan Guaidó's case, in front of it.

By contrast, the likes of Marco Rubio and John Bolton have been wrong about absolutely everything, ever. During this ongoing twentieth anniversary of the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, think on.

Another hung Parliament is coming, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it.

It has become a local commonplace that I am on 30-30-30 with Labour and the Conservatives here at North West Durham, so that any one of us could be the First Past the Post.

I will stand for this seat, if I can raise the £10,000 necessary to mount a serious campaign. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

Who Owns England?

Tim Adams reviews Guy Shrubsole’s landmark answer to that question:

The question posed by the title of this crucial book has, for nearly a thousand years, been one that as a nation we have mostly been too cowed or too polite to ask. 

Since the Domesday Book set the standard for a comprehensive land ownership survey – in part so the conqueror could hoover up some of the choicest millions of acres for the crown and its appetite for the hunt – England has never properly addressed the issue. 

The last major attempt at land reform, which involved a census of ownership, was attempted by the Liberal government of David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill in 1909; it led to constitutional crisis, neutered proposals and partial data. 

One of the most telling facts in Guy Shrubsole’s book is the revelation that the Land Registry – a body that George Osborne wanted to privatise – possesses details of the ownership of only 83% of England’s green and pleasant plot. Knowledge of the other 17% remains out of bounds even to Parliament.

Secrecy about ownership has become deliberately entwined with “an Englishman’s home is his castle” nonsense. That particular phrase has less weight when you consider that only 5% of English land is owned by householders, while 18%, by Shrubsole’s calculations, is in the control of corporate structures and offshore companies, many of them opaque. 

In France, you can pitch up at your local town hall and ask to see, free of charge, a map of who owns what in your neighbourhood. In England such a request carries a fee and is often frustrated by vague legal niceties around compulsory registration. 

For an individual to discover all that is known about land ownership in England would cost more than £72m. There has, as a result, been some serious journalistic legwork in Shrubsole’s endeavour.

An environmental campaigner for Friends of the Earth, he has used multiple freedom of information requests and a large network of crowdsourced informants and number crunchers to build up a credible picture of the pattern and detail of who owns what. 

Even so, he has come up against plenty of virtual Keep Out and No Trespassing signs, and some of his findings necessarily rely on best guesswork. 

Shrubsole became obsessed with the great unspoken question in part because of a walking knowledge of the countryside in which he grew up. He was born in Newbury in Berkshire and was 10 years old when the eco-warrior protests about the town’s bypass became a national news story in 1996. His parents kept some beehives in the woodland of the vast Sutton estate through which the bypass would run. 

Seeing first-hand as a boy how the bee population was threatened not only by motorways but also by the pesticides produced at the local Bayer plant, he learned to question the received wisdom that ancient barons, such as Sir Richard Sutton, who traced his lineage back to the time of the Domesday Book, were best thought of as duty-bound custodians of the landscape. 

West Berkshire was a perfect microcosm of many of the issues this book seeks to address. We might like to imagine that mass trespass battles over “right to roam” were fought and won in the 1930s onwards. 

It remains the case, however, that only 10% of land in England is open access, and that proportion shrinks to 1.5% in Berkshire. Shrubsole could see this on Sunday walks. There was, for a start, a significant amount of off-limits MoD land, not least at Greenham Common; but far more significant was the land held by corporate family structures, including the Yattendon estate, 9,000 acres owned by the Iliffe family, much of it planted to supply 80,000 Christmas trees annually; or the Englefield estate, 14,000 acres in the prime M4 corridor owned since the 18th century by the Benyon family (which also owns De Beauvoir Town in north London). 

The latter calls into question other myths around land ownership in this country. One is that the “landed interest” is a neutered force in our politics, undone by death duties and socialism. Richard Benyon, current owner of Englefield (and in receipt of £278,180 taxpayer-funded farm subsidies), is the richest of the current crop of Conservative MPs with estimated wealth of £110m. 

Another competitor for that title is Richard Grosvenor Plunkett-Enle-Erle Drax, who sits in the Commons for South Dorset. Drax, an ardent Brexiter, owns the 7,000-acre Charborough estate, originally established with profits from the sugar and slave trades. 

The estate is bounded by the longest wall in England, made up of 2m bricks; the public get to look beyond the wall for two days a year, when tea and cake is served to locals. In campaigning for Brexit, Richard Drax (as he judiciously calls himself) argued a strong anti-immigration line, stating: “I believe, as do many of my constituents, that this country is full.” 

The impression that we are a small and overcrowded island, that property is scarce and worth a lifetime’s work and debt to come by, that a little patch of suburban garden should reasonably be the aspiration of any true-born Englishman, has long been advanced by politicians of different stripes and for different reasons. 

You can rest assured, however, that the nation does not look very crowded from the Palladian windows of Englefield House or from Drax’s mullioned pile at Purbeck. Two-thirds of land in the UK as a whole – 40m acres – is owned by 0.36% of the population; 24m families, meanwhile, share the “urban plot” of 3m acres. The notion of the country being “full” is a political fantasy.#

When once asked how young entrepreneurs might succeed in Britain, the late Duke of Westminster, Gerald Grosvenor (owner of 131,000 acres, including much of London’s Belgravia and central Liverpool), observed, drily, that they should “make sure they have an ancestor who was a very close friend of William the Conqueror”.

Though Shrubsole estimates that the recent sell-off of ancestral lands to the “new money” of hedge-funders and oligarchs accounts for perhaps 17% of the total in England, 30% rests in the hands of the feudal Norman “cousinhood”, whose offspring have until recently preserved their birthright with a Downton-esque doggedness.

It is fascinating to be reminded that it was Winston Churchill, a Marlborough born, of course, at Blenheim Palace, who best articulated the iniquities of that inheritance. Shrubsole provides a compelling history of the challenges to land ownership of the last century or so, beginning with Churchill’s 1909 book The People’s Rights.

The relevant pages of that title might stand as a manifesto for all of the imbalances of our economy in the decades that have followed. “Land is by far the greatest of the monopolies,” Churchill argued, “… the land monopolist has only to sit and watch complacently his property multiplying in value, sometimes manifold, without either effort or contribution on his part; and that is justice!” 

The 1909 “People’s Budget” argued for a 20% land tax to be levied on future unearned increase in land values. The hundred-odd years war that budget set in train, between the landed and their tenants, had its moments of egalitarian triumph – the advance of the National Trust, for example – but in recent decades with the growth of offshore investment vehicles and the unchecked rise in wealth of the 1%, the balance has turned back towards the landowners.

You could see the results of that failed campaign, as Shrubsole convincingly does, as the roots of many of our contemporary difficulties – “the housing crisis is a land crisis”. The laundered cash that has poured into London property, much of which lies empty, has been facilitated by a taxation system that largely ignores the productive and commercial value of land.

In the shires, there is a radical shortage of building plots and a critical housing problem, while legacy landowners are subsidised to exploit the estates granted to them when the country’s entire population was equal to that of present-day Greater Manchester.

Shrubsole ends his fine inquiry into these issues with a 10-point prospectus as to how this millennium-long problem might be brought up to date, and how our land could be made to work productively and healthily for us all.

This ranges from obvious political measures to prevent landowners hoarding land and leaving property empty to a “public register of trusts” that would close loopholes around inheritance tax; also included are the need to reinvigorate buried pieces of legislation such as everyone’s “statutory right to an allotment” (we devote 10 times more land to golf courses). 

Any reform must begin, however, he argues, with a determined end to the secrecy around ownership. His book makes a good start. If we really want to “take back control” we might start by thinking about the ways we share out the nation’s primary sovereign resource, “this blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England”.

A Brief, Minor War?


This is a year of major European milestones. 

In April, NATO turned 70, to subdued celebrations in Washington and questions about the alliance’s continued relevance. 

June will mark the centennial of the Treaty of Versailles, a rending of empires that provided only a brief respite from world war. November will see the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Lost in these commemorations is the 20th anniversary of a brief, minor war. NATO began dropping bombs on Serbian forces in Kosovo on March 24, 1999. 

This three-month bombing campaign in the Balkans is an afterthought to most Americans today, a distant memory after the last two decades of ceaseless war around the Greater Middle East. 

Even at the time, Kosovo’s victors didn’t try too hard to inflate their accomplishment. 

When it was over, General Wesley Clark, Supreme Allied Commander Europe and the war’s director, admitted that, “This was not, strictly speaking, a war.” 

Kosovo’s veterans, none of whom died in action, won’t receive a spot on the National Mall. 

Yet the Kosovo War is worth reflecting on as a harbinger of many key features of America’s post-9/11 foreign policy—the era of forever war. America and NATO went to war in Kosovo for humanitarian reasons. 

There was no vital national interest at stake.

The Serbs, already responsible for the lion’s share of the atrocities during the Bosnian war, were to be punished and deterred from further mass killings in their restive, majority-Albanian province of Kosovo. 

Proponents of intervention compared ethnic cleansing in Kosovo to the Holocaust, sometimes inflating the death counts of Serbian atrocities by a factor of 10. 

That the ethnic Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army was considered “without any questions, a terrorist group” by President Bill Clinton’s own special envoy to the Balkans was hand-waved away. Kosovo gave birth to the idea of the responsibility to protect—“R2P” in international relations shorthand. 

R2P cast aside the Westphalian state system by declaring that when a government proved unwilling or unable to protect its people from crimes against humanity, it was the duty of other nations to intervene. British Prime Minister Tony Blair declared that Kosovo was “a battle between good and evil; between civilization and barbarity.” 

Established during America’s decade of unipolarity and hyperpower status, R2P thus implicitly called on America to be a force of intervention for global good. 

Proponents of this doctrine unabashedly cast aside state sovereignty for the sake of humanitarianism. 

As would later come in Iraq, with no United Nations Security Council mandate, the war’s backers proclaimed that it had “legitimacy if not legality,” an argument that would be repeated a few years later in Iraq.

R2P was celebrated by internationalists and interventionist human rights activists. 

After sitting on its hands for too long in Bosnia, America was now acting swiftly to prevent a potential genocide in Europe. 

At home as abroad, that “moral arc of the universe” was bending toward justice. 

Putatively liberal pundits and politicians, thrilling to this idea of America as global cop on the beat, were at the forefront of the push for war on Serbia in 1999. 

Christopher Hitchens, seeing in Kosovo both “Serbia’s Gaza” and “another Rwanda in the making,” celebrated as the bombs dropped. 

Michael Ignatieff, the peripatetic Canadian academic and politician, urged intervention to counter “the worst political crime in Europe since 1945.”

One wonders: why does Canada continually send their warmongers south? Is it payback for the rich harvest of Canadian comics that America regularly reaps?

Both men would resume the cheerleading for war a few years later, when the public relations campaign for the Iraq war began to spin up. 

Their ideological children are with us still: the Anne-Marie Slaughters and Richard Haases of the world, unwilling to contemplate reality in Afghanistan or Syria so long as a girls school can be saved or a recalcitrant minority group armed and assured of American aid. 

♦♦♦

R2P proponents helped carry water for America’s disastrous wars in Iraq and Libya. 

R2P was not explicitly used by the Bush administration when it made the case for invading Iraq, but humanitarianism and Saddam Hussein’s undeniable brutality were used as rhetorical cudgels against those who dissented from this war of choice. 

In Libya, R2P was the casus belli. Intervention was explicitly and indeed solely justified by the responsibility to protect Libyan civilians in Benghazi from the coming wrath of dictator Muammar Gaddafi. 

Of course, the goal posts were quickly moved, as NATO airpower helped the rebels to win the civil war and Gaddafi was murdered in the street. 

Libya sank into further strife, with militias battling in the cities, foreign militants flooding in, and even slave markets appearing. 

In Syria, humanitarian concerns only led the United States to arm jihadis and conduct a few feckless cruise missile strikes, rather than launch a full-scale invasion of yet another Arab country. 

One of the primary architects and apostles of R2P, then-UN ambassador Samantha Power, was left to sputter and rage about the atrocities of one side in the civil war. 

The Kosovo campaign exposed the hollow force that NATO had become less than a decade after the end of the Cold War.

All Western nations rightly took a peace dividend after the Soviet Union collapsed and the fearsome Red Army became the farcical Russian Army that (initially) couldn’t even subdue tiny Chechnya. 

The Europeans cut far more deeply than the United States, however. The vaunted Royal Air Force nearly ran out of bombs and spare parts in Kosovo. 

U.S. aircraft ended up conducting about two thirds of all sorties during the 78-day war and carried far more of the load in the early days of the campaign. 

Eighty-three percent of all munitions dropped were American. American generals were unpleasantly surprised by the state of NATO air assets. 

The European NATO states were most lacking in the most critical capabilities: ISR (intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance) and strike.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld initially rejected European assistance in the wake of the September 11 attacks, so struck was he by European military impotence in Kosovo two years prior. 

The limits of NATO’s smart bombs and precision strike capabilities also became clear in Kosovo. 

Despite overwhelming technological superiority, including the first combat use of the B-2 Spirit stealth bomber and the now standard GPS-guided Joint Direct Attack Munition, coalition attrition of Serbian forces turned out to have been more limited than early reports indicated. 

Poor weather, Serb cunning, and legacy air defense capabilities combined to limit the air campaign’s effect on Serbian materiel. 

The Serbs built dummy tanks with wood, plastic sheeting, and camouflage netting; metal plates and even hot water were used to spoof NATO thermal sensors. 

It took NATO the first 12 days to conduct the same number of strike sorties that the U.S.-led coalition had achieved during the first 12 hours of Operation Desert Storm. 

When Serbian troops withdrew from Kosovo at the end of the campaign, they left in good order, having suffered perhaps 20 percent of the casualties the coalition had originally claimed to have inflicted. NATO’s material inadequacies were matched by a lack of will.

European member states demurred from an aggressive U.S. plan to bomb Belgrade from the outset, likely prolonging the air war. 

When they did sign on to a broader air campaign, European leaders insisted on micromanaging the target list, in the manner of President Johnson in Vietnam 30 years before. 

This centralization, risk aversion, and fixation on preventing civilian casualties would become familiar to those who served with NATO troops in Afghanistan a few years later. Americans were right behind Europeans in risk aversion, however. 

Much of the indecisiveness of the air campaign was due to keeping NATO planes at high altitude to avoid the remaining Serbian air defense assets. 

Decoy tanks and dummy artillery pits were much tougher to spot at 15,000 feet than at 500. No pilots in body bags trumped operational effectiveness and decisive victory. 

The biggest legacy of the Kosovo war came in its immediate aftermath. 

Russia had tried to position itself between its Western economic benefactors and its traditional Serbian ally. 

Russian mediation offers were rejected by the U.S., and air strikes on Belgrade inflamed Russian public opinion. 

Even Boris Yeltsin, who owed his reelection in 1996 to U.S. intervention (the original, reverse Russiagate), could not stand for this level of shame. 

When Serbia capitulated, Russian troops rushed into Kosovo from neighboring Bosnia to seize the airport in the capital, Pristina. 

Elite Norwegian and British troops met the Russians at the airfield, but General Clark insisted on trying to block the runway to stymie Russian attempts to reinforce their 250-man company at Pristina. 

His more level-headed British subordinate, General Mike Jackson, refused to carry out Clark’s orders and reportedly told the hyper-ambitious Arkansan, “I’m not going to start the Third World War for you.” 

Cooler heads prevailed, no shots were fired, and Clark left his post early, headed for eventual irrelevance in the 2004 Democratic presidential primary. 

But the ailing and humiliated Yeltsin resigned six months later, giving the Russian presidency to Vladimir Putin. 

The war had left Kosovo as an autonomous region of Yugoslavia and then Serbia, policed by NATO’s Kosovo Force (KFOR). 

But Serbia’s continuing authority over Kosovo was still internationally recognized. 

The Kosovars, frustrated with the pace of final status negotiations, unilaterally declared independence on February 17, 2008. 

The international community was and is divided on recognizing Kosovo’s sovereignty, but Russia’s reaction was unequivocal.

Vladimir Putin described the recognition of Kosovo’s independence by the U.S. and many European nations as “a terrible precedent, which will de facto blow apart the whole system of international relations, developed not over decades, but over centuries.” 

He warned the West: “they have not thought through the results of what they are doing. At the end of the day it is a two-ended stick and the second end will come back and hit them in the face.” 

Putin explicitly invoked Kosovo after his incursion into Georgia in 2008 and his annexation of Crimea in 2014. 

Speaking to the Russian State Duma on March 18, 2014, Putin quoted America’s April 2009 Written Statement to the UN International Court in support of Kosovo’s independence, and asked what made Kosovo a special case.

He told the Duma’s deputies, “This is not even double standards; this is amazing, primitive, blunt cynicism. One should not try so crudely to make everything suit their interests, calling the same thing white today and black tomorrow.” 

Turnabout is fair play. America’s ill-considered endorsement of Kosovo’s independence not only deepened tensions with Russia, it quickly provided justification for Russian land grabs and wars on both sides of the Black Sea. 

Regardless of America’s laudable intentions and aims, the Kosovo war proved a handmaiden of two decades of disastrous interventions abroad. 

American hyperpower hubris, set free in a tiny corner of the Balkans, would unleash far more disastrous interventions in far more important regions of the world. 

Then-secretary of state James Baker had said of Yugoslavia in 1991, “We don’t have a dog in that fight.”

Since Kosovo, America has found fights wherever it looked for them.

Toadmeister Watch: Day 138

I repeat my challenge to Toby Young to contest this parliamentary seat of North West Durham. Either that, or he has conceded every point here.

His party took 34 per cent of the vote at North West Durham last time. Labour, it and I are now universally accepted as being on 30-30-30, so that any one of us could be the First Past the Post. 

But I do not stand against people. I stand for things. Another hung Parliament is coming, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it.

I will stand for this seat, if I can raise the £10,000 necessary to mount a serious campaign. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

This post will appear here daily until further notice.

Yaxley-Lennon Watch: Day 158

I warmly welcome Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, who calls himself "Tommy Robinson" but who would have to give his real name on the ballot paper, as the UKIP candidate for this parliamentary seat of North West Durham. Or, at any rate, as a candidate for this seat, of any party or none.

Either that, or he is running scared of the white working class. After all, I am mixed-race, and the sitting MP, who will presumably be the Labour candidate, has a mixed-race child. We are both impeccably middle-class (Google the house prices in Riding Mill, whence she hails), as the Conservative and the Liberal Democrat candidates will doubtless also be. 

From his own point of view, then, beating us ought to be a doddle.

Not that my candidacy is in any way conditional on his. Another hung Parliament is coming, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it. I will stand for this parliamentary seat of North West Durham, if I can raise the £10,000 necessary to mount a serious campaign. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

This post will appear here daily until Yaxley-Lennon officially runs away with his tail between his legs by denying that he is a parliamentary candidate for North West Durham.

Pidcock-Kamm Watch: Day 159

Either Laura Pidcock is proud that she is now Oliver Kamm's endorsed candidate for this parliamentary seat of North West Durham, or she will tweet the following:

"I reject the endorsement of @OliverKamm, and I have made a donation to @NeilClark66's legal fund against him," followed by the link to Neil's fund.

This post will appear here daily until that tweet has been posted.

Henig Watch: Day 165

Rather magnanimously, considering how he became the Leader of Durham County Council in the first place, the Durham Miners' Association has permitted Simon Henig to sit on the platform of the last two Durham Miners' Galas.

On both occasions, he has of course shared that platform with the principal speaker, Jeremy Corbyn. It is therefore the least to be expected that @SimonHenig will tweet the simple formula, ".@jeremycorbyn is not an anti-Semite." This post will appear here daily until that tweet has been posted.

Monday, 29 April 2019

Healthy Discharge Watch: Day Six

It has now been more than three weeks since the jury in my trial, the third attempt at one, was discharged.

The previous day, the star prosecution witness had been sent away to come up with the only piece of evidence, a single email that no one had ever asked to see until then.

As soon as they did, then he never reappeared on his video link from the United States, and the jury was discharged.

Three weeks later, that email, a perfectly simple thing to find, has still not turned up. It does not exist.

It is no wonder that we longer have even so much as a date for a Case Management Hearing, still less for a trial. There is no case against me. None.

But this post will appear every day until further notice.

Beyond that, another hung Parliament is coming, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it.

It has become a local commonplace that I am on 30-30-30 with Labour and the Conservatives here at North West Durham, so that any one of us could be the First Past the Post.

I will stand for this seat, if I can raise the £10,000 necessary to mount a serious campaign. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

Schoolgirl's Record of Achievement Watch: Day Six

It is now more than two years since the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party effectively abolished the Constituency Labour Party in North West Durham by denying it any role in the selection of its parliamentary candidate. It then imposed a 29-year-old who had never set foot here, and of whom next to no one here had ever heard.

Soon afterwards, she lost her seat on Northumberland County Council. I was present when she received that news, at the count for Durham County Council, where she was being introduced as the all-done-and-dusted Prospective Parliamentary Candidate to stalwarts who did not even know her name, but several of whom had already bought me drinks.

For some years by then, certain of them had been introducing me at funerals as, "The man who should have been our MP." Everyone does that now, and there no longer even needs to have been a death. They also call me "Speedboat", as in, "Here's what you could have won."

But I am a generous old soul. So I invite in the comments specific examples of the achievements of Laura Pidcock MP. This post will appear daily until the second anniversary of the 2017 General Election.

Beyond that, another hung Parliament is coming, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it. It has become a local commonplace that I am on 30-30-30 with Labour and the Conservatives here at North West Durham, so that any one of us could be the First Past the Post. I will stand for this seat, if I can raise the £10,000 necessary to mount a serious campaign. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

Forty Years On?

Hardly any fuss is being made of this week's fortieth anniversary of the 1979 General Election. Where it is being mentioned at all, then it is in relation to Margaret Thatcher's status as Britain's first woman Prime Minister. There is no sense that it was an ideological watershed.

The reason for that is because it wasn't. The Callaghan Government had turned to monetarism in 1977, and the transition from one monetarist Government to another was not, and is not, politically interesting in itself.

If those who are trying to bring down Jeremy Corbyn, for all his faults, were to have their way, then Britain would return to having no debate on economic policy, or indeed on foreign policy, where the hegemony goes back to 1956 at the latest.

Sadly, most Labour MPs are, and will remain, among those who wish to see the restoration of that sorry state of affairs. Another hung Parliament is coming, however, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it.

It has become a local commonplace that I am on 30-30-30 with Labour and the Conservatives here at North West Durham, so that any one of us could be the First Past the Post. I will stand for this seat, if I can raise the £10,000 necessary to mount a serious campaign. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

Lines of Inquiry

Was it not already a criminal offence to withhold evidence?

It is my friend's birthday today. When he was falsely accused of rape, then it made the front pages of the national newspapers. At any point prior to conviction, either party might be a victim. One of them might be a victim of rape. Or the other might be a victim of false accusation.

Harriet Harman of the Paedophile Information Exchange has been brought out from wherever it is that they keep her, to renew her demand that male heterosexual activity be criminalised per se, with the simple accusation as enough to convict. Everyone who supports the extradition of Julian Assange to Sweden must be of the same view.

Another hung Parliament is coming, however, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it. It has become a local commonplace that I am on 30-30-30 with Labour and the Conservatives here at North West Durham, so that any one of us could be the First Past the Post. I will stand for this seat, if I can raise the £10,000 necessary to mount a serious campaign. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

Toadmeister Watch: Day 137

I repeat my challenge to Toby Young to contest this parliamentary seat of North West Durham. Either that, or he has conceded every point here.

His party took 34 per cent of the vote at North West Durham last time. Labour, it and I are now universally accepted as being on 30-30-30, so that any one of us could be the First Past the Post. 

But I do not stand against people. I stand for things. Another hung Parliament is coming, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it.

I will stand for this seat, if I can raise the £10,000 necessary to mount a serious campaign. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

This post will appear here daily until further notice.

Yaxley-Lennon Watch: Day 157

I warmly welcome Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, who calls himself "Tommy Robinson" but who would have to give his real name on the ballot paper, as the UKIP candidate for this parliamentary seat of North West Durham. Or, at any rate, as a candidate for this seat, of any party or none.

Either that, or he is running scared of the white working class. After all, I am mixed-race, and the sitting MP, who will presumably be the Labour candidate, has a mixed-race child. We are both impeccably middle-class (Google the house prices in Riding Mill, whence she hails), as the Conservative and the Liberal Democrat candidates will doubtless also be. 

From his own point of view, then, beating us ought to be a doddle.

Not that my candidacy is in any way conditional on his. Another hung Parliament is coming, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it. I will stand for this parliamentary seat of North West Durham, if I can raise the £10,000 necessary to mount a serious campaign. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

This post will appear here daily until Yaxley-Lennon officially runs away with his tail between his legs by denying that he is a parliamentary candidate for North West Durham.

Pidcock-Kamm Watch: Day 158

Either Laura Pidcock is proud that she is now Oliver Kamm's endorsed candidate for this parliamentary seat of North West Durham, or she will tweet the following:

"I reject the endorsement of @OliverKamm, and I have made a donation to @NeilClark66's legal fund against him," followed by the link to Neil's fund.

This post will appear here daily until that tweet has been posted.

Henig Watch: Day 164

Rather magnanimously, considering how he became the Leader of Durham County Council in the first place, the Durham Miners' Association has permitted Simon Henig to sit on the platform of the last two Durham Miners' Galas.

On both occasions, he has of course shared that platform with the principal speaker, Jeremy Corbyn. It is therefore the least to be expected that @SimonHenig will tweet the simple formula, ".@jeremycorbyn is not an anti-Semite." This post will appear here daily until that tweet has been posted.

Sunday, 28 April 2019

Who Set Up Roger Scruton?

The Government did.

It knew what would happen, and this was the opportunity to silence criticism of neoliberal economic policy, of the extreme identitarian social policy from which that is inseparable, and of the neoconservative foreign policy of which Scruton himself is insufficiently critical, but which is utterly bound up with the other two.

Within the Conservative Party, the audience for such a critique is negligible. But that party was no part of the target audience here. This hit was intended as a message to the Blue Labour that, via the Lexit movement, has become increasingly allied to sections of the base of support for Jeremy Corbyn, so that it now has at least as much access to him as any Marxist theorist has. That was who this whole business was intended, by the Government, to shut up and to shut down.

Another hung Parliament is coming, however, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it. It has become a local commonplace that I am on 30-30-30 with Labour and the Conservatives here at North West Durham, so that any one of us could be the First Past the Post. I will stand for this seat, if I can raise the £10,000 necessary to mount a serious campaign. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

Free Us From This

I do not, on balance, agree with Jeremy Corbyn's decision to decline an invitation to attend the State Banquet for Donald Trump.

But anyone who uses the term "leader of the free world", like anyone who uses the term "Special Relationship", needs to make way for a grownup.

Notice that even the Government's own members and supporters are at pains to insist that they themselves would never have voted for Trump.

Provoking Corbyn and others into this kind of response is the only reason that this State Visit is being held, a disgraceful way to manipulate the Queen into getting out a vote that the Conservative Party openly despises but did used to be able to take for granted.

Another hung Parliament is coming, however, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it.

It has become a local commonplace that I am on 30-30-30 with Labour and the Conservatives here at North West Durham, so that any one of us could be the First Past the Post.

I will stand for this seat, if I can raise the £10,000 necessary to mount a serious campaign. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

Healthy Discharge Watch: Day Five

It has now been more than three weeks since the jury in my trial, the third attempt at one, was discharged.

The previous day, the star prosecution witness had been sent away to come up with the only piece of evidence, a single email that no one had ever asked to see until then.

As soon as they did, then he never reappeared on his video link from the United States, and the jury was discharged.

Three weeks later, that email, a perfectly simple thing to find, has still not turned up. It does not exist.

It is no wonder that we longer have even so much as a date for a Case Management Hearing, still less for a trial. There is no case against me. None.

But this post will appear every day until further notice.

Beyond that, another hung Parliament is coming, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it.

It has become a local commonplace that I am on 30-30-30 with Labour and the Conservatives here at North West Durham, so that any one of us could be the First Past the Post.

I will stand for this seat, if I can raise the £10,000 necessary to mount a serious campaign. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

Schoolgirl's Record of Achievement Watch: Day Five

It is now more than two years since the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party effectively abolished the Constituency Labour Party in North West Durham by denying it any role in the selection of its parliamentary candidate. It then imposed a 29-year-old who had never set foot here, and of whom next to no one here had ever heard.

Soon afterwards, she lost her seat on Northumberland County Council. I was present when she received that news, at the count for Durham County Council, where she was being introduced as the all-done-and-dusted Prospective Parliamentary Candidate to stalwarts who did not even know her name, but several of whom had already bought me drinks.

For some years by then, certain of them had been introducing me at funerals as, "The man who should have been our MP." Everyone does that now, and there no longer even needs to have been a death. They also call me "Speedboat", as in, "Here's what you could have won."

But I am a generous old soul. So I invite in the comments specific examples of the achievements of Laura Pidcock MP. This post will appear daily until the second anniversary of the 2017 General Election.

Beyond that, another hung Parliament is coming, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it. It has become a local commonplace that I am on 30-30-30 with Labour and the Conservatives here at North West Durham, so that any one of us could be the First Past the Post. I will stand for this seat, if I can raise the £10,000 necessary to mount a serious campaign. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

Subject To Scrutony

Yes, but, Roger Scruton. Yes, but.

What did you think that an interview with the New Statesman would be like? What would a Mail on Sunday interview with Chris Williamson be like? Why would the Mail on Sunday even want to interview Chris Williamson? Well, then, why would the New Statesman even want to interview Roger Scruton?

Is there a legitimate grievance here? Yes, but.

And the likes of the New Statesman are determined to depict criticism of figures such as George Soros, and of the positions that they espouse, as coming only from the world, either of the real Roger Scruton, or of a Roger Scruton that he might enable them to construct.

Another hung Parliament is coming, however, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it. It has become a local commonplace that I am on 30-30-30 with Labour and the Conservatives here at North West Durham, so that any one of us could be the First Past the Post. I will stand for this seat, if I can raise the £10,000 necessary to mount a serious campaign. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

Not Playing Games

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. But she really does not have that long to wait.

As his MP in Glasgow, George Galloway once got Hassan Rouhani a council house. Yes, really. They go back a very long way.

If George boarded a plane to Tehran and simply refused to leave without Nazanin, then he could bring her home.

And George is not a lone operator at the moment. He should make that trip with Nigel Farage, Claire Fox, Ann Widdecombe and Martin Daubney. Make this release the triumph of the Brexit Party, even before a vote had been cast.

As such a coalition, the Brexit Party would be mistaken to contest elections to the House of Commons. Another hung Parliament is coming, however, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it.

It has become a local commonplace that I am on 30-30-30 with Labour and the Conservatives here at North West Durham, so that any one of us could be the First Past the Post. 

I will stand for this seat, if I can raise the £10,000 necessary to mount a serious campaign. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

Knowing The Scores

Even if they were all Labour MPs, and most or all of the MEPs are also in there, then 90 would still be fewer than one in three. Subtract the 19 MEPs, and it is barely one in four.

Still, they are there, and most of them are going to be there for quite a while yet. The Member of Parliament for North West Durham is on the record of the House as wanting another referendum.

Another hung Parliament is coming, however, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it.

It has become a local commonplace that I am on 30-30-30 with Labour and the Conservatives here at North West Durham, so that any one of us could be the First Past the Post.

I will stand for this seat, if I can raise the £10,000 necessary to mount a serious campaign. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

Why North Korea Now Matters

South Korea needs gas. Russia has it.

Donald Trump wants to his dynasty to supply the world with coal deep into the twenty-second century. North Korea has that coal. Trump also wants his name on an hotel in Pyongyang, just because.

And China wants both South Korea and Japan on the Belt and Road, while they in turn want to be on it.

Kim Jong-un knows all of this, and he is not afraid to use that knowledge, any more than we would be if we were in a similar situation.

North Korea now matters. A lot.

It is a different question how many people in the House of Commons understand any of this. Another hung Parliament is coming, however, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it.

It has become a local commonplace that I am on 30-30-30 with Labour and the Conservatives here at North West Durham, so that any one of us could be the First Past the Post.

I will stand for this seat, if I can raise the £10,000 necessary to mount a serious campaign. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

Toadmeister Watch: Day 136

I repeat my challenge to Toby Young to contest this parliamentary seat of North West Durham. Either that, or he has conceded every point here.

His party took 34 per cent of the vote at North West Durham last time. Labour, it and I are now universally accepted as being on 30-30-30, so that any one of us could be the First Past the Post. 

But I do not stand against people. I stand for things. Another hung Parliament is coming, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it.

I will stand for this seat, if I can raise the £10,000 necessary to mount a serious campaign. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

This post will appear here daily until further notice.

Yaxley-Lennon Watch: Day 156

I warmly welcome Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, who calls himself "Tommy Robinson" but who would have to give his real name on the ballot paper, as the UKIP candidate for this parliamentary seat of North West Durham. Or, at any rate, as a candidate for this seat, of any party or none.

Either that, or he is running scared of the white working class. After all, I am mixed-race, and the sitting MP, who will presumably be the Labour candidate, has a mixed-race child. We are both impeccably middle-class (Google the house prices in Riding Mill, whence she hails), as the Conservative and the Liberal Democrat candidates will doubtless also be. 

From his own point of view, then, beating us ought to be a doddle.

Not that my candidacy is in any way conditional on his. Another hung Parliament is coming, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it. I will stand for this parliamentary seat of North West Durham, if I can raise the £10,000 necessary to mount a serious campaign. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

This post will appear here daily until Yaxley-Lennon officially runs away with his tail between his legs by denying that he is a parliamentary candidate for North West Durham.

Pidcock-Kamm Watch: Day 157

Either Laura Pidcock is proud that she is now Oliver Kamm's endorsed candidate for this parliamentary seat of North West Durham, or she will tweet the following:

"I reject the endorsement of @OliverKamm, and I have made a donation to @NeilClark66's legal fund against him," followed by the link to Neil's fund.

This post will appear here daily until that tweet has been posted.

Henig Watch: Day 163

Rather magnanimously, considering how he became the Leader of Durham County Council in the first place, the Durham Miners' Association has permitted Simon Henig to sit on the platform of the last two Durham Miners' Galas.

On both occasions, he has of course shared that platform with the principal speaker, Jeremy Corbyn. It is therefore the least to be expected that @SimonHenig will tweet the simple formula, ".@jeremycorbyn is not an anti-Semite." This post will appear here daily until that tweet has been posted.

Saturday, 27 April 2019

Healthy Discharge Watch: Day Four

It has now been more than three weeks since the jury in my trial, the third attempt at one, was discharged.

The previous day, the star prosecution witness had been sent away to come up with the only piece of evidence, a single email that no one had ever asked to see until then.

As soon as they did, then he never reappeared on his video link from the United States, and the jury was discharged.

Three weeks later, that email, a perfectly simple thing to find, has still not turned up. It does not exist.

It is no wonder that we longer have even so much as a date for a Case Management Hearing, still less for a trial. There is no case against me. None.

But this post will appear every day until further notice.

Beyond that, another hung Parliament is coming, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it.

It has become a local commonplace that I am on 30-30-30 with Labour and the Conservatives here at North West Durham, so that any one of us could be the First Past the Post.

I will stand for this seat, if I can raise the £10,000 necessary to mount a serious campaign. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

Schoolgirl's Record of Achievement Watch: Day Four

It is now more than two years since the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party effectively abolished the Constituency Labour Party in North West Durham by denying it any role in the selection of its parliamentary candidate. It then imposed a 29-year-old who had never set foot here, and of whom next to no one here had ever heard.

Soon afterwards, she lost her seat on Northumberland County Council. I was present when she received that news, at the count for Durham County Council, where she was being introduced as the all-done-and-dusted Prospective Parliamentary Candidate to stalwarts who did not even know her name, but several of whom had already bought me drinks.

For some years by then, certain of them had been introducing me at funerals as, "The man who should have been our MP." Everyone does that now, and there no longer even needs to have been a death. They also call me "Speedboat", as in, "Here's what you could have won."

But I am a generous old soul. So I invite in the comments specific examples of the achievements of Laura Pidcock MP. This post will appear daily until the second anniversary of the 2017 General Election.

Beyond that, another hung Parliament is coming, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it. It has become a local commonplace that I am on 30-30-30 with Labour and the Conservatives here at North West Durham, so that any one of us could be the First Past the Post. I will stand for this seat, if I can raise the £10,000 necessary to mount a serious campaign. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

Beyond The Banquet

This particular State Visit is a sign of a Conservative Party that is down to a core vote strategy within its core vote strategy.

It is desperately trying to motivate people whom it openly despises, but whom it used to be able to say had "nowhere else to go". Those people's reply is no longer even the name of another party. It is now "the telly" or "the pub".

Yet, as the estimable Ronnie Campbell pointed out on Newsnight, Jeremy Corbyn is probably wrong to decline an invitation to dine with Donald Trump.

For one thing, it has brought out those funny little people who use terms such as "leader of the free world". And how likely to Trump to want to meet Corbyn anywhere else, after this?

Those saying that Trump could not care less whether Corbyn, or Vince Cable, or John Bercow, turned up are of course quite right. But as so often when colonial politicians have been a bit uppity, the imperium is not the target audience. Such things are "for domestic consumption".

Cable, at least, is being politic here. The people who will appreciate this gesture are his people. But they are not Corbyn's. They are the people in Corbyn's party who spend all their time trying to bring him down. 

They are the people who have seceded from that party and who have been endorsed by Nancy Pelosi, of whom no more than one per cent of British voters has ever heard, but who should still be told to mind her own business. 

They are the people who wallow in the squalor of the Clintons, and who would give their right arms for dinner with Barack Obama, who has killed far more people than Trump ever has or probably ever will. Obama also has form as a meddler in British politics. I wish Pelosi all the success with Change UK that Obama had with the Remain campaign.

Alas, though, those whose two darkest days were the defeat of Hillary Clinton and the victory of Leave will make up the bulk of the next House of Commons, as they do of this one. Mercifully, they will be spread across several political parties, and another hung Parliament is coming. We need our people to hold the balance of power in it.

It has become a local commonplace that I am on 30-30-30 with Labour and the Conservatives here at North West Durham, so that any one of us could be the First Past the Post. I will stand for this seat, if I can raise the £10,000 necessary to mount a serious campaign. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

Please Go To The Diary Room

The Brexit Party's and Change UK's lead candidates in the South West are Ann Widdecombe and Rachel Johnson, who appeared together on Big Brother. What a time to be alive.

For all the merits either of Miss Widdecombe or of Claire Fox, who as the Brexit Party's lead candidate in the North West is also guaranteed election, no long-term political party contesting elections to the House of Commons is ever going to include both of them, just as it is never going to include both Nigel Farage and the markedly more conservative George Galloway, either. That might not matter in the long run, though.

I remain sceptical, so to speak, having been hearing about impending realignments for as long as I can remember. But if the EU referendum really has opened up some kind of fissure, then it is just possible, if wildly unlikely, that we might eventually see the emergence of two catch-all parties with their roots in the Remain and Leave campaigns, Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, a party of the res publica and a party of the demos.

If so, then the slowly emerging Democratic Party is already having its limits usefully defined for it, with Stephen Yaxley-Lennon and the rump of UKIP beyond its right flank, and with those who are advocating a boycott of the European Elections beyond its left flank. Both of those were already peripheral, anyway. But the slowly emerging Republican Party is in rather more trouble.

You see, the long-established Liberal Democrats and Scottish Nationalists, a third of which latter's voters in any case voted Leave, are in no mood to yield to the Gavin Esler class of self-appointed guardians of an economic and social liberalism that used of soft power where possible but hard power where necessary both at home and abroad to spread itself across the whole wide earth by means of an unquestionable alliance between the European Union and the United States, an alliance with Britain at both its cultural and its military heart, indeed with Esler's version of London as its global cultural capital.

And both the Lib Dems and the SNP are going to do a lot better at the European Elections than Change UK is. Like UKIP and Yaxley-Lennon, it is more likely than not to end up with no seats at all. Raising an important question. If there were not in fact an authoritarian liberal res publica at all, then where would be the need for the demos to rise up against it?

Nevertheless, and as these Elections are going to demonstrate, the overall shape of the three polities of England and Wales, of Scotland, and of Northern Ireland, is now such that, regardless of who led any party, another hung Parliament is coming, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it. It has become a local commonplace that I am on 30-30-30 with Labour and the Conservatives here at North West Durham, so that any one of us could be the First Past the Post. I will stand for this seat, if I can raise the £10,000 necessary to mount a serious campaign. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

Toadmeister Watch: Day 135

I repeat my challenge to Toby Young to contest this parliamentary seat of North West Durham. Either that, or he has conceded every point here.

His party took 34 per cent of the vote at North West Durham last time. Labour, it and I are now universally accepted as being on 30-30-30, so that any one of us could be the First Past the Post. 

But I do not stand against people. I stand for things. Another hung Parliament is coming, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it.

I will stand for this seat, if I can raise the £10,000 necessary to mount a serious campaign. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

This post will appear here daily until further notice.

Yaxley-Lennon Watch: Day 155

I warmly welcome Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, who calls himself "Tommy Robinson" but who would have to give his real name on the ballot paper, as the UKIP candidate for this parliamentary seat of North West Durham. Or, at any rate, as a candidate for this seat, of any party or none.

Either that, or he is running scared of the white working class. After all, I am mixed-race, and the sitting MP, who will presumably be the Labour candidate, has a mixed-race child. We are both impeccably middle-class (Google the house prices in Riding Mill, whence she hails), as the Conservative and the Liberal Democrat candidates will doubtless also be. 

From his own point of view, then, beating us ought to be a doddle.

Not that my candidacy is in any way conditional on his. Another hung Parliament is coming, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it. I will stand for this parliamentary seat of North West Durham, if I can raise the £10,000 necessary to mount a serious campaign. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

This post will appear here daily until Yaxley-Lennon officially runs away with his tail between his legs by denying that he is a parliamentary candidate for North West Durham.

Pidcock-Kamm Watch: Day 156

Either Laura Pidcock is proud that she is now Oliver Kamm's endorsed candidate for this parliamentary seat of North West Durham, or she will tweet the following:

"I reject the endorsement of @OliverKamm, and I have made a donation to @NeilClark66's legal fund against him," followed by the link to Neil's fund.

This post will appear here daily until that tweet has been posted.

Henig Watch: Day 162

Rather magnanimously, considering how he became the Leader of Durham County Council in the first place, the Durham Miners' Association has permitted Simon Henig to sit on the platform of the last two Durham Miners' Galas.

On both occasions, he has of course shared that platform with the principal speaker, Jeremy Corbyn. It is therefore the least to be expected that @SimonHenig will tweet the simple formula, ".@jeremycorbyn is not an anti-Semite." This post will appear here daily until that tweet has been posted.

Friday, 26 April 2019

Healthy Discharge Watch: Day Three

It has now been more than three weeks since the jury in my trial, the third attempt at one, was discharged.

The previous day, the star prosecution witness had been sent away to come up with the only piece of evidence, a single email that no one had ever asked to see until then.

As soon as they did, then he never reappeared on his video link from the United States, and the jury was discharged.

Three weeks later, that email, a perfectly simple thing to find, has still not turned up. It does not exist.

It is no wonder that we longer have even so much as a date for a Case Management Hearing, still less for a trial. There is no case against me. None.

But this post will appear every day until further notice.

Beyond that, another hung Parliament is coming, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it.

It has become a local commonplace that I am on 30-30-30 with Labour and the Conservatives here at North West Durham, so that any one of us could be the First Past the Post.

I will stand for this seat, if I can raise the £10,000 necessary to mount a serious campaign. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

Schoolgirl's Record of Achievement Watch: Day Three

It is now more than two years since the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party effectively abolished the Constituency Labour Party in North West Durham by denying it any role in the selection of its parliamentary candidate. It then imposed a 29-year-old who had never set foot here, and of whom next to no one here had ever heard.

Soon afterwards, she lost her seat on Northumberland County Council. I was present when she received that news, at the count for Durham County Council, where she was being introduced as the all-done-and-dusted Prospective Parliamentary Candidate to stalwarts who did not even know her name, but several of whom had already bought me drinks.

For some years by then, certain of them had been introducing me at funerals as, "The man who should have been our MP." Everyone does that now, and there no longer even needs to have been a death. They also call me "Speedboat", as in, "Here's what you could have won."

But I am a generous old soul. So I invite in the comments specific examples of the achievements of Laura Pidcock MP. This post will appear daily until the second anniversary of the 2017 General Election.

Beyond that, another hung Parliament is coming, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it. It has become a local commonplace that I am on 30-30-30 with Labour and the Conservatives here at North West Durham, so that any one of us could be the First Past the Post. I will stand for this seat, if I can raise the £10,000 necessary to mount a serious campaign. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

This Ticket Punches

My polling card has arrived. Yours too, I expect. So that's the end of Brexit, then. In for another five years means in forever.

No referendum. Just never quite leaving. We are now more likely to join the eurozone and the Schengen Area than we are to leave the EU.

I understand the calls from sections of the Left for a boycott of the European Elections. But that is always a bad tactic. If an election or a referendum is being held, then someone is going to win it.

And notice that everyone from Rory Stewart to a Remainer activist in the Question Time audience makes a point of referring to the Brexit Party as the vehicle, not only of Nigel Farage, but also of George Galloway.

The other side has recognised that this is a joint ticket. Even if you would never have voted for Galloway, then vote for Farage. Even if you would never have voted for Farage, then vote for Galloway.

Unless you would not have voted for George at Bradford West in 2012, and certain very fringe elements of the Left did take that view, then vote for the Brexit Party in 2019. 

Remainers, meanwhile, make sure to vote Lib Dem, and confine Blairism to the same dustbin as "Tommy Robinson".

By the way, just as I alone predicted a hung Parliament in 2017, so I alone predicted that George would win Bradford West in 2012, when everyone else said that he would lose his deposit.

Another hung Parliament is coming, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it.

It has become a local commonplace that I am on 30-30-30 with Labour and the Conservatives here at North West Durham, so that any one of us could be the First Past the Post.

I will stand for this seat, if I can raise the £10,000 necessary to mount a serious campaign. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

School Daze?

Even without the VAT, the fees for commercial schools are far beyond the reach of anyone in the middle of anything.

You can go to school for free in this country, and most people do. But this needless expense makes very affluent people feel as if they are struggling, since they really do have to make certain sacrifices, by their own standards, in order to meet it. In turn, that makes them very vocal against, for example, a modest increase in their own direct taxation.

The condition of a commercial school’s continuing charitable status, including its exemption from VAT, should be its having been adjudged good or better by the same body, and 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, it must be said that those schools regularly provide left-wing figures with a platform that they are seldom or never afforded by the schools 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. 

While we are seeking to make the world better, then we still have to live in it as it is. It is not hypocritical to do so as best we can. The hypocrites are the highly activist Education Ministers, usually Conservatives, who buy their own children out of the practical application and implications of their policies. Their hypocrisy is never, ever called out. Well, it would certainly be called out by me.

Another hung Parliament is coming, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it. It has become a local commonplace that I am on 30-30-30 with Labour and the Conservatives here at North West Durham, so that any one of us could be the First Past the Post. I will stand for this seat, if I can raise the £10,000 necessary to mount a serious campaign. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.