Panel Beating?

It turns out that no hustings are being held at North West Durham because the great and the good of the Constituency Labour Party refuse to allow Laura Pidcock to be put up against me. Yes, really. None of them had met her two and half years ago, and none of them has signed her nomination papers this year, but most or all of them have known me for anything up to 35 years.

Meanwhile, her own exotic entourage is falsely telling potential venues that hustings with me on the panel would be a breach of my bail conditions. Either on principle, or because they are registered charities such as churches or community centres, or both, those venues are not prepared to hold hustings without inviting all of the candidates. Of course, Pidcock's camp followers have known that that would be the situation.

Another hung Parliament is coming, however, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it. I am standing for Parliament here at North West Durham. The crowdfunding page is here, and buy the book here. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

The True Yellow

The Liberal Democrats did not moderate the Conservatives during the Coalition. If anything, it was the Conservatives who moderated them. The Governments since 2015 have been economically well to the Coalition's left, and they have embarked on no military adventure that has been remotely as bad as the war in Libya.

We now see the Lib Dems as they truly are, believing in perpetual austerity in order to run a deranged permanent budget surplus, and gleefully announcing their willingness to launch a nuclear attack while sincerely convinced that the Conservative, Labour and Scottish National Parties are all controlled by "Russia".

Another hung Parliament is coming, however, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it. I am standing for Parliament here at North West Durham. The crowdfunding page is here, and buy the book here. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

Simply British?

The Good Friday Agreement requires that a border poll be held if the Secretary of State has reasonable grounds to believe that it would result in a majority for a United Ireland. Most obviously, that would be if Nationalist parties received more than half the votes cast at an election in Northern Ireland. That point will be reached in the next five years.

The UUP is trying to sell itself as the party for people who have been to Great Britain and quite liked it, or who have heard about Great Britain and would therefore quite like to go there, as against the DUP as the party for people who have never been to Great Britain, or who have been there and hated it, or who have heard about it and are therefore determined never to go there.

How well each of them had done by comparison with the other will therefore have profound implications for the question that is almost never asked, namely whether the people of Great Britain had any desire to hold on to Northern Ireland.

Another hung Parliament is coming, however, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it. I am standing for Parliament here at North West Durham. The crowdfunding page is here, and buy the book here. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

Marr It For Him

During Boris Johnson's "interview" with Andrew Marr, Jeremy Corbyn should tweet his intention to abolish the BBC licence fee, and Andrew Neil should tweet his resignation from the BBC before going on Sky News to tell us all what a bunch of shills the BBC were.

Another hung Parliament is coming, however, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it. I am standing for Parliament here at North West Durham. The crowdfunding page is here, and buy the book here. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

They Are Getting Snappy

"A snapshot, not a prediction." "This would be the result if there were a General Election this week, but there isn't." They took one look at what was supposed to have been the game-changing YouGov MRP poll, and they ran a mile.

They spent about two months last time claiming that Dennis Skinner was going to lose his seat, and that the Conservatives were going to take Tony Blair's old one. How did either of those work out?

Not that this is new. When I think of some of the claims that Blair groupies made during the General Election campaigns of 2001 and 2005. But they had no social media to amplify their idiocy, or to record it for posterity.

Another hung Parliament is coming, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it. I am standing for Parliament here at North West Durham. The crowdfunding page is here, and buy the book here. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

Build A Bridge And Get Over It?

As if this lot were capable of organising a false flag. Pull the other one.

Jeremy Corbyn is wrong about a very great many things, but there would have been no Islamic State at all if people had listened to him about Iraq.

And automatic release after half a sentence was introduced a long time ago by the Conservatives. If they now disagree with it, then they have had nine years in which to correct it.

Another hung Parliament is coming, however, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it. I am standing for Parliament here at North West Durham. The crowdfunding page is here, and buy the book here. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

Happy Birthday To You, And To Your Spirit

Today is the fiftieth anniversary of the coming into effect of Blessed Paul VI’s Apostolic Constitution Missale Romanum, which mandated the celebration of the New Rite of Mass from the First Sunday of Advent, 30th November 1969. Although the Vatican is tellingly not marking this anniversary in any way at all, here, by way of a shameless plug, is a passage from my next book:

Although they might have been dramatic at the time, there was nothing remarkable about the Latin Church’s restoration of vernacular liturgy, of Communion in both kinds, of concelebration, or of the Permanent Diaconate in general and that of married men in particular.

Although it is probably too late to do anything about it now, the first would have been better gone about by reference to those Protestants who were in the 1960s maintaining in the vernacular something approaching the classical liturgical life of the Western Tradition.

The same attentiveness would have made possible the second on certain occasions even in what is now called the Extraordinary Form, one of several reforms that the Council really does mandate.

Instead, it was the decision of Catholics to render the Sacred Liturgy into the language of the public house and the betting shop that moved Anglicans and Lutherans to do likewise, not without bitter resistance and significant loss of attendance. 

Eastern Catholics have always had concelebration, with no more concelebrants than can be accommodated in the sanctuary, all in full vestments, and all reciting the Eucharistic Prayer inaudibly along with the principal celebrant; they are rightly horrified at our “mob concelebrations”, our parcelling out of the Eucharistic Prayer, our distracting cacophony as if that Prayer were addressed to the congregation rather than to God, and so forth.

There is nothing new about the celebration of Mass facing the congregation, which was done routinely for educational and other purposes before the Council. But nor is there any denying that, in the intellectual and cultural context of the period, its near-universal adoption has had the effect of turning the congregation in on itself, and of expressing a certain solidarity of the bourgeoisie with itself, easily collapsing into smugness and disengagement. Such trends need to be checked. 

The utterly non-theological non-argument that “the Latin Mass was the same everywhere” would have no force even if had any factual basis, which it does not.

The historically late and even aberrant Low Mass, never designed for congregational use, has been made the model when in fact the normative form, historically and ecclesiologically, is the Solemn Pontifical Mass celebrated, at least on Sundays and other great festivals, by the Bishop in his Cathedral Church. It is to this that all other celebrations, at least on those days, should approximate as closely as possible. 

Children are brought to Mass, and it is vitally important that they be so. But even in a school context, still less anywhere else, it is never about them. That way lies mass lapsation in the secondary school years.

The normative music of the Western Rite is Gregorian Chant and the Sacred Polyphony based on it, to which all other music should likewise approximate as closely as possible. Alongside the Mass settings, the art of good hymnody urgently needs to be revived. We must never forget that the use of secular music is explicitly banned, just as we must never forget that certain modifications of the Immemorial Roman Rite as celebrated in the 1960s are explicitly required by the Council.

Useful though the Jerusalem Bible’s footnotes are, the text itself is frightful. The Revised Standard Version is preferred by all sensible people, and certainly not the New Revised Standard Version with the masculine pronouns taken out to the ruination of the sense; if the Bible is that bad, then why use it at all? 

At least until such time as anyone has the wit to reissue the RSV Edition of the Missal, authorisation of which has never been withdrawn, those reading at Mass (or, of course, on other liturgical occasions) should read out the appointed passage from the superlative Ignatius Bible, which no English-speaking Catholic should be without.

Nothing could better accompany the move to a more accurate translation of the Mass, suitable for properly educated people. Above all, away with the atrocity that is the Happytudes instead of the Beatitudes.

The God Who Speaks

As the Year of the Word begins tomorrow, here are a few passages from, ahem, my own forthcoming book. Shameless, I know:

Vatican II certainly did define the primacy of Scripture in teaching and practice, not that there was anything even vaguely or remotely novel in that. It certainly did not define the primacy, or even the admissibility, of secular and secularising Biblical criticism. 

The Authorship of God’s Written Word is, like the Person of His Incarnate Word, both fully human and fully divine. The Bible comes only with, in and through the Church that defined its Canon and has preserved it through the ages, and its implications for doctrine, for morality and for future hope are integral to its literal, Authorially original sense. 

The founders of Protestantism spoke of Scripture’s plain sense, but that sense is in fact canonical and ecclesial, allegorical and typological, tropological and moral, anagogical and eschatological, while also including the historical factuality of the events recorded as such at least from the Call of Abram onwards, with apparent difficulties finding their resolution precisely in Canon and Church, in Tradition and Magisterium. It is that which enjoys priority in faith and practice.

*

God’s Book of Scripture begins by recording the beginning of God’s Book of Nature, presenting the Author of both as creating, naming and commanding: He is concerned with being, knowing and doing; with ontology, epistemology and ethics. Throughout the Old Testament, God raises up priests, prophets and kings accordingly, corresponding to that with which each of these branches of philosophy is concerned, until the Perfect Form of all three appears in and as the Person of Jesus Christ, Who proclaims Himself to be the (Ethical) Way, the (Epistemological) Truth and the (Ontological) Life, and Who commissions His Ecclesial Body to teach (epistemologically), to govern (ethically) and to sanctify (ontologically).

The Septuagint translators had no problem identifying that creating, naming and commanding Author of both Books with and as the Logos of their wider Hellenistic culture, while the New Testament writers had no problem presenting the Perfect Priest, Prophet and King as the Incarnation of that same Logos, recognised in both the Septuagint translators’ own and the New Testament writers’ own Hellenism by the Semites who compiled the Septuagint. Is it possible that they recognised in the Hebrew concept the root of the Hellenistic concept? Or rather, is it possible that they did not do so?

One might add that “He saw that it was good”, and that “Behold, it was very good.” Beauty discloses being, truth and goodness: the really identical categories of being (i.e., of being created by God), of being true and of being good are in turn really identical with being beautiful. What could be more Platonic or more Thomist, not to mention saner or more commonsensical? And what could be more Biblical, when one looks at the very first chapter of the Bible?

*

Just as “conservatives” are challenged by the fact that the Bible, of all things, is an integral part of the roots of Western philosophy, but only if at least initially Afrocentric and related insights are taken on board, so “liberals” are equally challenged by the fact that it is the Bible, of all things, that is a standing contradiction and critique, both of the Eurocentrism of those who see philosophy as beginning with the Greeks, and of Greek misogyny when one contrasts the Greek belief that heredity was only on the male side with the Hebrew presupposition, seen in the purity and incest laws, of a biological relationship with both parents.

This latter difference has, in turn, profound class implications: the Greek theory was devised by members of a homosocial urban leisure class, whereas the Hebrew writers were working farmers, not to mention husbands and fathers. It is the Bible that is on the side of the working class, reflecting its practical wisdom. And it is the Bible that is on the same side as feminism, precisely because these parts of it were written by patriarchs. One might add that several Old Testament books, such as Ruth and Esther, although their precise authorship is unknown, were clearly written by women, just as, say, Pride and Prejudice would clearly have been written by a woman even if one had never heard of Jane Austen. So women were clearly literate in Hebrew culture, just as much of the Old Testament presupposes mass popular literacy generally.

*

In order to be more fully Herself, the Catholic Church needs to encourage large numbers of Her members to learn the culture of the Word from that Evangelical tradition which is historically, if even in its own terms no longer necessarily, separated from Her full communion. Such a culture is one in which the defining narratives are those of the Old and New Testaments. All cultures define and perpetuate themselves by telling stories, and the Bible culture initially arose in order to fill the gaps left after the Reformation where the Lives of the Saints had previously been.

Catholicity, however, requires both, not least in order to express the indivisible continuity between the Bible and the Church. Catholics are not being asked to take on anything remotely Protestant as such here: look at the Liturgy, look at the Fathers (up to and including the Medieval Doctors), look at the Medieval and post-Medieval mystics, and look at the iconography and other spirituality of the Christian East, whether Catholic or separated. Taking on is a defining mark of Catholicism, which radically and fundamentally distinguishes the Catholic Church from the giving up that characterises Protestantism.

*

While the heart of the Catholic Faith is indeed God’s incarnational redemption of human life and history from within, the various Quests for the Historical Jesus have floundered due to the lack of agreement as to the objective criteria for determining which parts of the Gospels are, and which are not, historical in the post-Enlightenment sense. It is absurd to assume, apparently a priori, that Saint John’s Gospel, the Infancy Narratives and anything involving miracles are by definition unhistorical. An absolute insistence that miracles do not ever happen is not even compatible with agnosticism, much less with Christianity.

On the matter of John, it is very much worthy of note that even Professor Dennis Nineham, in his epilogue to The Myth of God Incarnate, cites B H Streeter’s calculation that, except for the 40 days and nights in the wilderness, everything attributed to Jesus in all four Gospels could have happened in a mere three weeks. (This argument is also very useful against those who would deny the authority of the Apostolic Traditions.)

In any case, historical criticism cannot be treated as if it existed apart from the several other means of engagement with the Biblical text; they need all to be applied within the context of each other, even if sometimes to demonstrate why some of them are potentially useless, and even dangerous. And after all, both the Historical Jesus and the Historic Christ are here and now in the form of the Church, which is the Body of Christ and “Christ in action”. There is no human being without the stories about him or her, and without the community defined by those stories. There is no Historical Jesus without the Gospels and the Church. No such Jesus exists.

*

Useful though the Jerusalem Bible’s footnotes are, the text itself is frightful. The Revised Standard Version is preferred by all sensible people, and certainly not the New Revised Standard Version with the masculine pronouns taken out to the ruination of the sense; if the Bible is that bad, then why use it at all? At least until such time as anyone has the wit to reissue the RSV Edition of the Missal, authorisation of which has never been withdrawn, those reading at Mass (or, of course, on other liturgical occasions) should read out the appointed passage from the superlative Ignatius Bible, which no English-speaking Catholic should be without. Nothing could better accompany the move to a more accurate translation of the Mass, suitable for properly educated people. Above all, away with the atrocity that is the Happytudes instead of the Beatitudes.

Councillor Watch: Day 138

I hereby invite all Labour members of Durham County Council who believe me to be guilty of the criminal charges against me to email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com and say so.

I would not be able to reply to those emails, but every day the names of those who had sent them to me would appear here. So far, I have received none.

The Laura Pidcock Drugs Challenge: Day 174

I have never taken any illegal drug, and I challenge Laura Pidcock MP to say the same.

This post will appear here daily until it has received an answer.

A Boy Named Sue?

Everyone thinks that I should sue for malicious prosecution and so forth. Well, perhaps I am too magnanimous for my own good, but I would settle for four times the Durham County Councillor's allowance that I would have had for at least four years if I had not been maliciously prosecuted. That allowance is £13,300, so the sum would be £53,200. Net, of course. That State need not think that it would be taxing half of it back.

I would be awarded a lot, and I do mean a lot, more than that if I sued. It is an almost invisibly tiny proportion of what this whole business has already cost. But be warned. This offer lasts only until the General Election. If I were also not to be elected on that occasion, then it would go up by five times the MP's salary that I would have had for at least five years, an addition of £397,340. Giving a total of £450,540. Again, net, of course.

What's that, you say? Laura Pidcock would have beaten me, anyway? Laura Pidcock would have beaten me, anyway? Frankly, I would like to see that one tested in court. I would like to see each of us brought before a jury, after which it would be asked to consider, all other things being equal, which of us it would have elected to Parliament, and which of us it would indeed have assumed to have been an MP if it had not known otherwise.

At least one other candidate would also testify that he would not have stood against me at all if the criminal action against me had not still been ongoing at the time, despite already having been shown in open court to have been so baseless that the prosecution's star witness had had to be made to disappear overnight four thousand miles away in order to cause the jury to be discharged and the whole thing to be dragged out for another year, entirely at public expense.

A vote for Pidcock is in any case a vote for a by-election within a year. Politically, she is entirely dependent on Ben Sellout, who is the bromantic partner of Simon Henig (and thus the only other person on the planet who can stand Henig on a personal level), and who has been Henig's accomplice in cutting the pay of 472 Teaching Assistants by 23 per cent.

This time next year, Henig and Sellout will be looking forward to their first of five or more Christmases in the same cell, as two of the people who are going to be sent to prison for having tried to send me there. At least for Sellout's role in that, if not for her own, Pidcock's own position will be untenable. Indeed, no longer being an MP might be the only thing that could save her from an exemplary custodial sentence.

And in view of the circumstances giving rise to the North West Durham by-election of 2020, I would win it by a mile. So possibly out of compassion for the feeble-minded and thus easily-led Pidcock, and certainly for the sake of sheer efficiency, it would just be easier to vote for me on 12th December 2019. My crowdfunding page is here, and buy the book here. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

White Noise

That is what all "Labour and anti-Semitism" stuff should now be called.

It is by its subscription to the IHRA Definition of Antisemitism that Labour is now a racist party. That Definition is a silencing of BAME, migrant and refugee experiences of the kind that leads to the Windrush scandal and to the fire at Grenfell Tower.

If at all possible, do not vote for anyone who subscribes to that racist Definition. Including any Labour candidate at this General Election, if at all avoidable. Theirs is the party from which Jackie Walker, Tony Greenstein and Marc Wadsworth have all been expelled. Those were members in good standing under Tony Blair. But under Jeremy Corbyn, they have been expelled. White noise, indeed.

Another hung Parliament is coming, however, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it. I am standing for Parliament here at North West Durham. The crowdfunding page is here, and buy the book here. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

A Legitimate Question

There are numerous public policies relating directly to children, several of which are to the financial benefit of their parents, so Boris Johnson should have been asked under parliamentary privilege how many children he had.

Anything other than a precise numerical answer would have exposed his fundamental unfitness for office. As it still would, if that question were to be put to him by, say, Andrew Neil. Alas, though it probably never will be, just as it never was by any MP on the floor of the House.

Another hung Parliament is coming, however, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it. I am standing for Parliament here at North West Durham. The crowdfunding page is here, and buy the book here. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

Decriminalise This

Those who are either revolting or rejoicing at the prospect of the decriminalisation of abortion, when was an abortion last refused under the current law?

At what point in at least the last 30 years might decriminalisation not have been passed if it had been presented to either House of Parliament? And following what possible outcome of this General Election might decriminalisation not be passed were it to be so presented?

Another hung Parliament is coming, however, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it. I am standing for Parliament here at North West Durham, where I am the only pro-life candidate, having been proposed by the man who ran pro-life for many, many years in one of the most Catholic towns in England.

The crowdfunding page is here, and buy the book here. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

Drawing Down

Of course the Trump Administration is talking to "the Taliban", meaning that the war in Afghanistan was all for nothing. That is how these things always end. Alas, though, scarcely a soul in the next House of Commons will understand what once almost all MPs would have understood implicitly.

Another hung Parliament is coming, however, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it. I am standing for Parliament here at North West Durham. The crowdfunding page is here, and buy the book here. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

Other People Are Responsible?

So now we know.

The BBC subjected Jeremy Corbyn to an extremely hostile interview before it had even booked Boris Johnson, it still has not done so, Johnson himself regards whether or not he appears as above his pay grade, and the BBC is on course to give his puppet-masters the interviewer of their choice.

If that last came to pass, or if there never were a Johnson interview, then Andrew Neil ought to resign.

Another hung Parliament is coming, however, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it. I am standing for Parliament here at North West Durham. The crowdfunding page is here, and buy the book here. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

Councillor Watch: Day 137

I hereby invite all Labour members of Durham County Council who believe me to be guilty of the criminal charges against me to email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com and say so.

I would not be able to reply to those emails, but every day the names of those who had sent them to me would appear here. So far, I have received none.

The Laura Pidcock Drugs Challenge: Day 173

I have never taken any illegal drug, and I challenge Laura Pidcock MP to say the same.

This post will appear here daily until it has received an answer.

Never Walk Alone

I still believe in things like the need for a unanimous jury in order to convict beyond reasonable doubt, and the absolute protection against double jeopardy. David Duckenfield has been found not guilty, and as far as I am concerned, that is that.

But 96 people were unlawfully killed, so somebody must be responsible. And if the Crown Prosecution Service cannot get Duckenfield convicted of any of the 95 charges that it brought against him, then how does it imagine for one second that it stands at least a 50 per cent chance, which is its own criterion, of getting me convicted of either of the ones against me, both of which had already been torn apart in open court when the prosecution's comically incredible star witness disappeared overnight in the United States, causing the jury to have to be discharged?

There are six other candidates here at North West Durham. Six. But none of them ever mentions the charges against me. Ever even mentions them at all. Nor does The Northern Echo, which reported my trial on its front page earlier this year, and which had a reporter at my hearing last week. He would appear to have filed no report, although I am a parliamentary candidate on his paper's patch. Utter silence all round. There is a reason for that.

My crowdfunding page is here, and buy the book here. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

Fiscal Studies

The Institute for Fiscal Studies was founded to oppose the introduction of corporation tax and capital gains tax. That the BBC regards it as independent and respected says everything that needs to be said about the BBC.

And that the Liberal Democrats are the only party that it would now support says all that needs to be said about the Lib Dems. Far from their having restrained austerity, the Conservative-only Governments since 2015 have been economically well to the Coalition's left. As a party, the Lib Dems alone remain committed to austerity. Hence their endorsement by the IFS.

Another hung Parliament is coming, however, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it. I am standing for Parliament here at North West Durham. The crowdfunding page is here, and buy the book here. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

What Should MRP Stand For?

Answers in the comments, please.

This ridiculous poll does not even mention Chris Williamson at Derby North, where he is seeking re-election and where he has the deepest possible political roots. Roger Godsiff apparently does not exist, either. He, too, is just another "Other", to be given somewhere under 10 per cent of the vote as a formality. Like Williamson. Or like the unmentioned George Galloway at West Bromwich East, where he has already forced the mighty Tom Watson out of the race.

This poll is a joke. Never mind me. On these figures, the other Independent at North West Durham, the very long-serving and well-known Councillor Watts Stelling, would get fewer votes than at either of his previous attempts, and he would lose his deposit for the first time. He kept it against Hilary Armstrong, but he would lose it 14 years later against Laura Pidcock? If you believe that, then you will believe absolutely anything at all.

Another hung Parliament is coming, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it. I am standing for Parliament here at North West Durham. The crowdfunding page is here, and buy the book here. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

Now That's Just Cheap

The Northern Echo has always been a right-wing paper, as the local papers in Labour fiefdoms generally are. And it has clearly taken an editorial decision to back the Brexit Party. But in listing the other candidates, it could at least get my name right. 

Despite the fact that until I became a parliamentary candidate I was a regular contributor to its letters page, and despite the fact that I was on its front page earlier this year, it persistently calls me by a middle name by which I have never been known, as if to suggest a different person. Now that's just cheap. 

Another hung Parliament is coming, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it. I am standing for Parliament here at North West Durham. The crowdfunding page is here, and buy the book here. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

Poll Dancing To Oblivion

YouGov is claiming that the hugely unpopular Laura Pidcock is going to do better than she did last time, before we got to know her. No doubt its predictions everywhere else are just as laughable. It assumed that this poll would be huge news, but it just isn't. Of course it isn't.

Another hung Parliament is coming, however, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it. I am standing for Parliament here at North West Durham. The crowdfunding page is here, and buy the book here. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

Not The Right Way Forward

In admitting that austerity had always been both a political choice and a mistaken one, Boris Johnson has admitted, not only that Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell had been right all along, but that all four people whom Corbyn had ever beaten for Leader of the Labour Party had been wrong. Sadly, though, most Labour MPs are still going to agree with those four defeated candidates.

Another hung Parliament is coming, however, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it. I am standing for Parliament here at North West Durham. The crowdfunding page is here, and buy the book here. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

Councillor Watch: Day 136

I hereby invite all Labour members of Durham County Council who believe me to be guilty of the criminal charges against me to email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com and say so.

I would not be able to reply to those emails, but every day the names of those who had sent them to me would appear here. So far, I have received none.

The Laura Pidcock Drugs Challenge: Day 172

I have never taken any illegal drug, and I challenge Laura Pidcock MP to say the same.

This post will appear here daily until it has received an answer.

Outgun This

If it is the case that we would be "outgunned and outranged" in a military conflict with Russia, a country with an economy only the size of Italy's, then here's a thought. Let's not have a military conflict with Russia. Let's cut all ties that might pull us into one.

No such luck from the Conservatives, of course. Never mind the Liberal Democrats, whose hawkishness is now alarmingly unhinged, and calls to mind the likes of John Bolton. Or from most Labour MPs, who will still be living in the Bush and Blair years, and who think that Boris Johnson is a Russian asset. Or even from the Labour Party itself, whose manifesto even this time extols the glories of NATO, and also of nuclear weapons. So much for Jeremy Corbyn.

Another hung Parliament is coming, however, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it. I am standing for Parliament here at North West Durham. The crowdfunding page is here, and buy the book here. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

Stars In Our Eyes

The United Kingdom ought indeed to increase its subscription to the European Space Agency. This Government gets almost nothing right, but its enthusiasm for space exploration is an important, if rare, exception. 

Life is the geological force that shapes the Earth, and the emergence of human cognition fundamentally transforms the biosphere, not least by the uniquely human phenomenon of economic growth. Thus is human mastery of nuclear processes beginning to create resources through the transmutation of elements, enabling us, among other things, to explore space and to exploit the resources of the Solar System. Vladimir Vernadsky and Krafft Ehricke will yet have their day.

The technologies that will bring us to that day have always been impossible without public funding, and they always will be. As much for that reason as for any other, outer space is the province of all humanity, the property of us all. In fact faithful to the principles set out by President Eienhower when he addressed the United Nations General Assembly on 22nd September 1960, Britain and others must insist on this common ownership against American, increasingly also Asian, and other corporate interests. 

And that is where confidence in this Government breaks down. But what of the other lot?

Look back to 1870, to each of what were to become the New Deal United States, Social Democratic Western Europe, and the Soviet Bloc. Then look at each of those in 1970. Neither laissez-faire economics, nor caring overly much about the fate of rare voles, had delivered electrification, or mass transportation, or decent accommodation, or proper sanitation, or universal vaccination, or space exploration. Meaning that these days, the ostensible heirs of those traditions would resist any and all of those developments. In parts of the world where they do not have to live, they actively do resist them.

The all-women shortlist system, of which Laura Pidcock is a beneficiary, has done more than anything else to turn the Parliamentary Labour Party from 50 per cent Broad Left in 1994 to 85 per cent Hard Right today. The changes to the British economy since 1977 have turned into the ruling class the public sector middle-class women who dominate the PLP, while the wars waged since 1997 have barely affected them, having largely been waged for explicitly feminist reasons, albeit to no good effect for the women of Afghanistan, and to catastrophic effect for the women of Iraq and Libya.

A position of being anti-industrial at home but pro-war abroad is ridiculous in itself, and bespeaks a total lack of comprehension of how wars are fought. But those MPs are Thatcher’s Daughters, unable to understand the rage against deindustrialisation and against the harvesting of young men in endless, pointless wars, and probably unaware of a growing number of young men’s closely connected discovery for themselves of the various schools of heterodox economics, and of the traditional Great Books that, for ostensibly if questionably feminist reasons, have been excluded from school and university curricula.

Mother Gaia reigns supreme, and we are expected to fight wars for Her even while, under Her petticoats, we shiver and starve in the dark. Another hung Parliament is coming, however, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it. I am standing for Parliament here at North West Durham. The crowdfunding page is here, and buy the book here. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

Inspired By Their Zionist Masters?

I remember when Conservative MPs used to say far stronger things from the same position than have ever been uttered by Apsana Begum or Claudia Webbe.

But with the Palestinian cause at the front and centre of the global struggle against racism and imperialism, to exclude views such as Begum's and Webbe's would be to exclude almost all politically conscious and active people of colour in the world. Upper caste Hindu supremacists would be the only significant exception.

It would also exclude one of the great pillars of the anti-racist and anti-imperialist struggle, the Jewish Left, as well as at least half of Orthodox Jews in the world, including by far the fastest growing section of the Jewish population of Britain. To both of those, the identification of Zionism as fundamental to Jewish identity is anathema.

Although it would appear that the matter was not being pressed, Begum and Webbe are both in breach of the IHRA Definition of Antisemitism, by which all members of the Labour Party are now bound on pain of expulsion, and which constitutes a denial of BAME, migrant and refugee experience of the kind that leads to the Windrush scandal and to the fire at Grenfell Tower.

Another hung Parliament is coming, however, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it. I am standing for Parliament here at North West Durham. The crowdfunding page is here, and buy the book here. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

For The Life

I am all for opposing the abortion policies in the Labour and Liberal Democrat manifestos. But I cannot see how much their implementation would change in practice. And I cannot for the life of me see what difference voting Conservative would make.

Another hung Parliament is coming, however, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it. I am standing for Parliament here at North West Durham. The crowdfunding page is here, and buy the book here. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

No Allowance Made

Who knew that the marriage allowance still existed? If its purpose is to encourage marriage or to discourage divorce, then it is an abject failure.

I am all for encouraging marriage, and I am all for discouraging divorce. Such encouragement and discouragement needs to be by means that are not so ineffective as to lead most people to assume that they must have been abolished decades ago.

Another hung Parliament is coming, however, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it. I am standing for Parliament here at North West Durham. The crowdfunding page is here, and buy the book here. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

Unredacted

Yes, the NHS would be up for grabs in any trade agreement with the United States negotiated by Boris Johnson or his party.

It was also up for grabs under the European Union's TTIP, the principle of which will still be supported by most Labour MPs, as it still is by the Liberal Democrats, therefore by their assortment of newfound hangers on, and also by the SNP.

Another hung Parliament is coming, however, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it. I am standing for Parliament here at North West Durham. The crowdfunding page is here, and buy the book here. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

Councillor Watch: Day 135

I hereby invite all Labour members of Durham County Council who believe me to be guilty of the criminal charges against me to email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com and say so.

I would not be able to reply to those emails, but every day the names of those who had sent them to me would appear here. So far, I have received none.

The Laura Pidcock Drugs Challenge: Day 170

I have never taken any illegal drug, and I challenge Laura Pidcock MP to say the same.

This post will appear here daily until it has received an answer.

Blondie Goes Yellow

Michael Heseltine privatised more of the British economy than any other Minister, ever. He destroyed Britain's, including County Durham's, coal industry. And now, he endorses the Liberal Democrats. Think on.

Another hung Parliament is coming, however, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it. I am standing for Parliament here at North West Durham. The crowdfunding page is here, and buy the book here. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

Reflects The Despair?

Is Ephraim Mirvis even a British citizen? If so, then when, exactly, did he become one? And what, exactly, qualifies one as a "major religious leader", since the United Synagogue has a nominal membership of 40,000 and a fully active membership that is almost certainly a great deal smaller than that? In any case, those members never signed up to the political opinions of the Chief Rabbi of the day.

Staying with the numbers, fewer than 20 people per year are convicted of anti-Semitic crime in this country. Less than one such conviction per year, on average, is for a violent offence. Is the entire criminal justice system part of the anti-Semitic conspiracy? Or is there no wave of anti-Semitic incidents in the first place?

Oh, and do not think about Jeremy Corbyn's interview with Andrew Neil. Corbyn's supporters hate Neil, anyway. The media in general, the BBC in particular, and Neil perhaps above all. They probably did not even watch it. The Labour vote next month will show the media quite  how many people like that there now were on the Left (there are also people like that on the Right). But the media will pay absolutely no attention.

Equality, Act

Parents are the first educators of their children. And what was in dispute at Anderton Park was not an examination subject. Birmingham Hall Green should return Roger Godsiff to the coming hung Parliament.

Also on the principle that parents are the first educators of their children, I am standing for Parliament here at North West Durham. The crowdfunding page is here, and buy the book here. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

Compelled To Make?

I am glad that Justin Welby has come out in support of Ephraim Mirvis. Does everyone in the Church of England, never mind all Christians in the United Kingdom, agree with the Archbishop of Canterbury? Well, then, nor do all British or Commonwealth Jews agree with "their" "Chief Rabbi".

Meanwhile, the Equality and Human Rights Commission has no interest in the economic equality without which there can be no other, and it sacks its black and disabled staff first. Every member of it will have voted for Change UK. To hell with the metropolitan liberal elite within the metropolitan liberal elite. Welcome the hatred of Blairism Enthroned.

Another hung Parliament is coming, however, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it. I am standing for Parliament here at North West Durham. The crowdfunding page is here, and buy the book here. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

Not Zoned Out Here

There are two responses to the case of Novlett Robyn Williams. One is that a white person of her class or above would never have been charged. The other is that any person below her class would have been sent to prison. Both of those responses are correct.

Another hung Parliament is coming, however, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it. I am standing for Parliament here at North West Durham. The crowdfunding page is here, and buy the book here. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

Gripped By Anxiety?

Try and imagine Ephraim Mirvis voting Labour. Try and imagine him voting anything other than Conservative. You can't. Of course you can't. Some people are just obviously Tories, in the way that some people are just obviously not. Mirvis is blindingly in the former camp.

But then, his predecessor, Lord Sacks, is a Mike Pence speechwriter and a Jordan Peterson enthusiast who was involved in a march through East Jerusalem that featured the chant, "Death to the Arabs!"

In any case, "Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth" is a ridiculous vanity title, since the United Synagogue, which the bearer of that moniker heads, has 40,000 members in a country of 66 million, and there are 270,000 Jews in the United Kingdom, never mind in the Commonwealth.

270,000. That is really not very many. The Jewish population of Britain is smaller than the number of people who voted to re-elect Jeremy Corbyn as Leader of the Labour Party in 2016, and in 2015 66 per cent of British Jews voted Conservative even though the Labour Party was at that time led by a Jew. We are talking about the core Conservative vote here, and about an extremely small section even of that.

The heavily publicised "Enough Is Enough" demonstration attracted fewer people than would protest against an unwanted road scheme or housing development in any country town, and it was largely made up of non-Jewish politicians, of their paid staff, and of the paid staff of the Israeli Embassy. The counter-demonstration probably featured more Jews, and it certainly featured more Jews who held only British nationality.

The Board of Deputies of British Jews does not represent, either the 50 per cent of British Jews who are not members of synagogues, or the large and rapidly expanding Haredi ("ultra-Orthodox") community that is often highly critical of Zionism and of Israeli policy, and which has close and longstanding ties both to Corbyn and to Diane Abbott. Again, everyone from the Board of Deputies is always a blindingly obvious Tory.

The Jewish Leadership Council is plain and simple astroturfing by what little remains of the once-mighty Conservative Party machine in London. The Campaign Against Antisemitism is a textbook example of a fake charity, and it ought to be deregistered accordingly. The Community Security Trust is an arguably illegal paramilitary organisation. The combined readership of the Jewish Chronicle, the Jewish Telegraph and the Jewish News is infinitesimal, and they are all hardcore Conservative-supporting newspapers.

And so on. Alas, though, most Labour MPs will still be as in thrall to all of this as all over MPs will be. Another hung Parliament is coming, however, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it.

I am standing for Parliament here at North West Durham, against a Labour candidate who, like all of them including Corbyn, has signed up to the IHRA Definition of Antisemitism, which is a denial of BAME, refugee and migrant experience of the kind that leads to Windrush and to Grenfell Tower. The crowdfunding page is here, and buy the book here. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

Councillor Watch: Day 134

I hereby invite all Labour members of Durham County Council who believe me to be guilty of the criminal charges against me to email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com and say so.

I would not be able to reply to those emails, but every day the names of those who had sent them to me would appear here. So far, I have received none.

The Laura Pidcock Drugs Challenge: Day 169

I have never taken any illegal drug, and I challenge Laura Pidcock MP to say the same.

This post will appear here daily until it has received an answer.

Crowning Thoughts

This is a vitally important article by Peter Hitchens on the false basis for the bombing of Syria.

By contrast, of course he knows that a monarchy without a monarch is a daft idea. Moreover, the monarchy does not in any way constrain either the power or the vanity of British politicians. Quite the reverse, in fact. As the Queen's Ministers, they behave however the like.

Hitchens refers to taking the salute of the Armed Forces, but Margaret Thatcher did exactly that at the victory parade after the Falklands War. He refers to pardoning criminals, but Michael Howard arranged Royal Pardons for his drug-dealing cousins in Swansea. And so on.

Claims about stability, or liberty, or relative freedom from political violence at home, are very bad jokes to the individuals, families and communities that, for example, suffered cracked skulls from mounted policemen, if they even really were policemen. Those assailants were acting with the complete impunity of the same Royal Prerogative that was recently used to try and shut down Parliament for five weeks without its consent.

People like Jeremy Corbyn have always wanted to abolish the monarchy, but they have always thought that there were more important things to do. The threat to the monarchy was always going to come from the Right, but I had assumed that it would be from the New Right, with whose ideology it is wholly incompatible.

As it is, though, it looks as if that threat might come from the Old Right, which as Hitchens sets out has cottoned on that most monarchs have never been and will never be like the present one. The monarchy, and this must include the Queen herself, has done absolutely nothing to protect the things that traditional conservatives hold dear.

As to the Commonwealth Realms, who in Britain even knows very much about Canada or Australia, much less about Saint Lucia or the Solomon Islands? Who in Canada even knows very much about Australia, or vice versa? Who in Saint Lucia even knows very much about the Solomon Islands, or vice versa? How much good did coming from Commonwealth Realms do most of the victims of the Windrush scandal?

And as to Defending the Faith (and the present title was conferred on Henry VIII by Parliament in 1544; it is not the one given to him by Pope Leo X but revoked by Paul III), how successfully have Christianity in general and Protestantism in particular been defended in the countries where that title is in use, namely the United Kingdom, Canada and New Zealand? Or in any other monarchy, come to that?

Contrast the number of people who go so far as to pay a tax to belong to an Evangelical Church of Germany that is still headquartered in Hanover, with the number of people who ever so much as darken the door of the Church of England, or the Church of Scotland, or the Church of Denmark, or the Church of Sweden, or the Church of Norway, or the Dutch Reformed Church. Germany and Britain are very, very alike. One retains a near-total ban on Sunday trading, and a near-total ban on abortion after the first trimester. The other retains a monarchy.

There is no evidence that the monarchy contributes anything to tourism, and Hitchens points out that from that point of view it "has engulfed London in a mile-deep wave of tat for decades". But the tourists would of course come, anyway. It would be the cheap, plastic Queens and Prince Charleses that would go.

But Hitchens's proposal that "some harmless white-haired senior civil servant towards the end of his or her career" take on the role does not ring true, either. Such people are now younger than he is, and their views are nowhere near his own. He does not ordinarily regard them as "harmless" in the least.

No, Hitchens is talking himself out of saying what he really feels that he now needs to say. And on this one, aren't we all?

Fool Around And Have A Ball?

Well, there you have it. Under the Conservatives, income tax, National Insurance (which I do not much like) and VAT (which is a monstrosity) merely would not go up. 

There is no suggestion of cutting them. Just as there is no ruling out of, for example, reverting to Margaret Thatcher's and Nigel Lawson's taxation of earned and unearned incomes at the same rate.

The dial has moved. The Overton Window has shifted. Things are not as they were.

Of course, there is always somebody lagging behind. The Liberal Democrats now propose a permanent budget surplus. Not even a rainy day fund, but a fund into which there would no dipping even in the midst of a Biblical flood.

Its only purpose would be to enable the Chancellor of the Exchequer to look at the lovely big numbers. Lovely big numbers that, since nothing could be done with them, might as well not exist.

Another hung Parliament is coming, however, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it. I am standing for Parliament here at North West Durham.

The crowdfunding page is here, and buy the book here. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

Never Mind The Baltics

Each of the main parties is now either genuinely convinced that the other is being run by the Russians, or at least prepared to pretend to be so in the hope that enough people will be.

Well, if both parties really are being run by the Russians, then, all in all, Britain under such a regime is not all that bad. Perhaps we should just stop worrying, relax, and get on with things?

Mobilisation No More

I do not know why I have only just noticed this. Nobody speaking officially on behalf of the Conservative Party ever, ever brings up that "Corbyn and the IRA" stuff. They just don't. Of course, the people to whom it matters are hardly swing voters, anyway. Or are they?

Until the Brexit Party decided to negate its own purpose by accepting Boris Johnson's Withdrawal Agreement and by standing down over half of its candidates, then the Conservatives had had every reason not to encourage the Outer Right to vote at all. The days when, on arriving at the polling station, they had been obliged to vote Conservative for the sheer want of anything else, had seemed to be over. 

Those days are back now. Even if there is a Brexit Party candidate, then what is the point of that person, since people who want to vote for Johnson can and will simply vote for his party? But the pattern has been set. The Conservative Party is now out of the habit of mobilising the old troops as part of its core vote strategy. With other options to its right as an increasingly normal feature of British politics, it is no longer convinced that they necessarily are part of its core vote. That is a very major shift.

Uber Mensch?

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. 

Another hung Parliament is coming, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it. I am standing for Parliament here at North West Durham. The crowdfunding page is here, and buy the book here. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

Blair Out?

Tony Blair used to expel people from the Labour Party for advocating tactical voting. Or, rather, they were deemed to be autoexcluded. The rules have not changed. As of today, Tony Blair is not a member of the Labour Party, and cannot apply to re-join for the next five years. Or have I missed something?

Another hung Parliament is coming, however, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it. I am standing for Parliament here at North West Durham. The crowdfunding page is here, and buy the book here. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

Contingency? Arrangement?

How is there supposed to be justice for the WASPI women when the Labour Party, and not least Laura Pidcock, do not know who is a woman and who is not?

Is there to be compensation for everyone of the right age who self-identifies as a woman?

Another hung Parliament is coming, however, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it. I am standing for Parliament here at North West Durham.

The crowdfunding page is here, and buy the book here. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

South China See

The Opposition has won the local elections in Hong Kong by a landslide. Meaning that it can.

The best thing to do with people who think that this is something to do with some "Anglosphere" is to laugh at them.

They went bananas at the idea of letting in people from Hong Kong in the run-up to the Handover, and Hong Kong under British rule was a very repressive place indeed, with elections, if at all, then often a lot less free than these ones.

None of this is in any way about that. We are not missed there, and in any case many of the demonstrators these days have no first hand memory of us.

They would react with mere bewilderment to some upper-class twit on the Daily Telegraph or the BBC who thought that they were expressing any nostalgia for the Colonial Period.

They do react with mere bewilderment to any upper-class twit on the Daily Telegraph or the BBC who thinks that they are expressing any nostalgia for the Colonial Period. 

As for Xinjiang, what would we do with people like that if they showed up here? Or, at any rate, what ought we do with them?

There are many bad things about China. But hysteria is not in order. And the world is as it is, not as we might necessarily like it to be. Thatcherites and Blairites have never been able to see that.

Another hung Parliament is coming, however, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it. I am standing for Parliament here at North West Durham.

The crowdfunding page is here, and buy the book here. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

Councillor Watch: Day 133

I hereby invite all Labour members of Durham County Council who believe me to be guilty of the criminal charges against me to email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com and say so.

I would not be able to reply to those emails, but every day the names of those who had sent them to me would appear here. So far, I have received none.

The Laura Pidcock Drugs Challenge: Day 168

I have never taken any illegal drug, and I challenge Laura Pidcock MP to say the same.

This post will appear here daily until it has received an answer.

Light My Candles In A Daze?

As the Liberal Establishment cheers on the Trump Administration's white supremacist military coup in Bolivia, then consider that that country contains 70 per cent of the world's reserves of lithium.

And lithium is of course essential to the "Green New Deal" and what have you; to the projected array of gigantic public subsidies to the transnational corporate enforcers of Political Correctness, of wokeness, and so forth.

Even Jeremy Corbyn has allowed this to be one of several overlapping interests that have taken him hostage, although it is of course his ludicrous position on Brexit that is going to cost him the General Election.

Another hung Parliament is coming, however, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it. I am standing for Parliament here at North West Durham. The crowdfunding page is here, and buy the book here. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

Royal Reality

There is no historical basis to the theory that the monarchy exists to embody the better side of our national character, however defined at any given time.

Whatever Prince Andrew may or may not have done, then it has nothing to do with why anyone should be either a monarchist or a republican, and it has nothing to do with why any serious person is.

Councillor Watch: Day 131

I hereby invite all Labour members of Durham County Council who believe me to be guilty of the criminal charges against me to email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com and say so.

I would not be able to reply to those emails, but every day the names of those who had sent them to me would appear here. So far, I have received none.

The Laura Pidcock Drugs Challenge: Day 166

I have never taken any illegal drug, and I challenge Laura Pidcock MP to say the same.

This post will appear here daily until it has received an answer.

No Indication, No Intention

For this parliamentary seat of North West Durham, nobody who has nominated Laura Pidcock has ever been elected to anything, while Councillor Watts Stelling has not been nominated by any other member of Durham County Council.

On Monday 18th November, I therefore invited the Labour members of Durham County Council for wards in this constituency to contact me by 3pm on Friday, to say whether or not they intended to vote for Ms Pidcock.

And I invited the other Independent members of Durham County Council for wards in this constituency to contact me to say whether or not they intended to vote for Councillor Stelling, apart from Councillor Alex Watson, who had already indicated his intention to vote for me.

I therefore have to inform you that no Labour Councillor has indicated an intention to vote for Ms Pidcock, meaning that the following have not done so: Councillors Jane Brown, Joanne Carr, Malcolm Clarke, Jude Considine, Olwyn Gunn, Ivan Jewell, Ossie Johnson, and Fraser Tinsley.

And no Independent Councillor has indicated an intention to vote for Councillor Stelling, meaning that the following have not done so: Councillors Patricia Jopling, Peter Oliver, Stephen Robinson, Anita Savory, John Shuttleworth, and Alan Shield.

My crowdfunding page is here.

Labour’s Manifesto: Lost Opportunities, Lost Possibilities

Maurice Glasman does not hold back.

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

I am standing for Parliament here at North West Durham. The crowdfunding page is here, and buy the book here. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

Abortion Up To Birth, You Say?

Margaret Thatcher did this in 1990.

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

I am standing for Parliament here at North West Durham. The crowdfunding page is here, and buy the book here. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

In Tutela Nostra Limuria?

As the deadline passes for Britain to cede the Chagos Islands, the good old BBC is still calling Diego Garcia the "home" of the American base there, and it is still referring to the rest of the archipelago as "uninhabited" as if it always had been.

Chagos is the infallible litmus test of being inside or outside the British Establishment. But Mauritius has also done damn all for the Chagossians over the years. They are very badly treated there. What matters now is self-determination. Not only, but not least, because that would close a base that has been vital to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and to the practice of extraordinary rendition. 

In the person of David Miliband, the last Labour Government, to which most Labour MPs will remain devoted, was so evil as to declare a "marine reserve" around the Chagos Islands, in order to prevent the return of the illegally and immorally exiled Islanders. 

No one would ever do that to the Falkland Islanders. Google some images of the Falkland Islanders, Google some images of the Chagossians, and see if you can spot the difference. In the same vein is the view that there are somehow too many people in the world. Which people, exactly? We all know the answer to that one.

Most Labour MPs are still going to be as bad as Miliband, whom most of them had wanted as Leader in 2010. Not only that, but the injustice against the Chagossian people was perpetrated by Denis Healey in the first place.

Another hung Parliament is coming, however, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it. I am standing for Parliament here at North West Durham. The crowdfunding page is here, and buy the book here. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

Manifest Truth

That strange, shouty man on Question Time simply was in the top five per cent if he earned £80,000. That is a fact. In which bracket did he think that that kind of money put him? We know the answer to that, because he claimed in all seriousness that he was not even in the top 50 per cent, which begins at around £26,000. Mind you, I remember Laura Pidcock whining about how poor she was on £79,468 plus expenses, so there is a lot of this about.

The median household income in this country does not hit £30,000. 43 per cent of adults do not reach the income tax threshold of £12,501, effectively a thousand pounds per month. Two in five adults are on less than that. And the idea, uncorrected by the useless host, that all doctors and solicitors made 80 grand was downright laughable.

Also uncorrected, because it always is, was the repeated suggestion that Britain had been "bankrupt" 10 years ago. But it was the State that bailed out the banks, not the other way round. On the day of the 2010 General Election, this country did not have a recession, but it did have a triple A credit rating. Neither state of affairs was to last long after that Election.

By this morning, even the Today programme was having to admit that Labour's projected spending would be around the European average (in fact it would be lower than in France, Italy, Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway or Sweden), that the annual increase would be equivalent only to the annual budget of NHS England, and that public spending had accounted for a higher proportion of national income during the privately made financial crisis, blowing out of the water yesterday's endless claim that nothing like this had been seen since the War.

Let's see how far the Conservative manifesto really differs from the Labour one. Let's see it rule out Margaret Thatcher's and Nigel Lawson's taxation of earned and unearned income at the same rate. Let's see it rule out putting up tax on the top five per cent. And let's see its enormous plans for public spending, several of which have already been announced.

Even in America, they talk up their economic individualism. In Britain, the only people who even bother to do that are a highly Americanised little sect that seems to be faintly hurt that nobody else has ever heard of the obscure seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth century figures whom they think ought to be our national heroes and sages. That sect operates mostly within the party of which the only permanent element is, of all people, the farmers, whose sector is necessarily always the most socialised of any economy.

But both main parties have flirted with this kind of thing over the last 40 years, each secure in the knowledge that it had a large enough electoral base both to guarantee its own survival and to dampen its misdirected ardour. Neither of them is doing so today, though. For that, you now need the Liberal Democrats. And even then, again, they know that enough people will vote for them anyway, either for the sake of Remain or because they always do.

What both main parties know but for some reason neither of them will say, even though it was simply presupposed both by the bank bailout and by every war ever, is that a sovereign state with its own free floating fiat currency has as much of that currency as it chooses to issue to itself. It literally cannot run out of money.

Both fiscal means and monetary means exist to control inflation, and to encourage certain forms of behaviour while discouraging others. What those forms of behaviour are to be, and how much inflation is to tolerated or sometimes even encouraged, are the stuff of political choice, so that both fiscal policy and monetary policy must be subject to democratic political control.

Yet most politicians in Britain today either have no understanding of any of this, or they pretend not to have. Another hung Parliament is coming, however, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it. I am standing for Parliament here at North West Durham. The crowdfunding page is here, and buy the book here. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

Councillor Watch: Day 130

I hereby invite all Labour members of Durham County Council who believe me to be guilty of the criminal charges against me to email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com and say so.

I would not be able to reply to those emails, but every day the names of those who had sent them to me would appear here. So far, I have received none.

The Laura Pidcock Drugs Challenge: Day 165

I have never taken any illegal drug, and I challenge Laura Pidcock MP to say the same.

This post will appear here daily until it has received an answer.

Serious Attention

The Liberal Democrats would not, under any circumstance, support either Boris Johnson or Jeremy Corbyn in the coming hung Parliament. They are therefore irrelevant, being for all practical purposes abstentionist. Electing a Sinn Féin MP may make a point, but it cannot make a difference. The same thing applies here this time.

The SNP has said that it would support Corbyn if he gave it something that he had categorically ruled out, but that it would not support Johnson no matter what. Again, that line is the line of irrelevance.

The Brexit Party has rendered itself redundant by endorsing Johnson's appalling Withdrawal Agreement, and by standing down over half of its candidates. If you want Johnson, then you should vote Conservative. And if you want Johnson, then no doubt you will.

And the Greens and Plaid Cymru have given up everything for which they have ever stood. They have become wholly owned subsidiaries of a party that devised and implemented the austerity programme for more than half of its life, that remains committed to permanent austerity as a matter of principle, that waged the war in Libya, and whose Leader says that she would launch a nuclear attack. Allied to that, the Greens and Plaid Cymru are no longer worthy of serious attention, much less of electoral support.

Another hung Parliament is coming, however, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it. I am standing for Parliament here at North West Durham. The crowdfunding page is here, and buy the book here. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

Austere Reasoning

So, was it "the Tories", all on their own and without reference to the EU, who caused the austerity in Greece, or the privatisation in Italy, to name but two? 

Was it a fluke that the then pro-austerity Conservatives, the then and still pro-austerity Liberal Democrats, the pro-austerity SNP, and the pro-austerity wing of the Labour Party, all campaigned for Remain in 2016?

Or that the areas that swung the referendum for Leave were the ones that had been hardest hit by the economic policies of the previous 39 years, beginning with the Callaghan Government's turn to monetarism in 1977?

And is it a fluke that the Labour vote in those areas is now in free fall? Jeremy Corbyn's betrayal of the Brexit in which he has always believed has cost him what ought to have been an easy victory over this dreadful Government. 

Another hung Parliament is coming, however, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it. I am standing for Parliament here at North West Durham. The crowdfunding page is here, and buy the book here. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

Seconds Out

When Owen Smith challenged Jeremy Corbyn for Leader of the Labour Party, then Corbyn's supporters said that Smith's policy of a second referendum on EU membership would be electoral poison, strong enough to cost Labour even an otherwise easy General Election. They were right. 

Another hung Parliament is coming, however, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it. I am standing for Parliament here at North West Durham. The crowdfunding page is here, and buy the book here. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

Des Chiffres et Des Lettres?

This has now been removed twice from the end of the first paragraph of Rachel Riley's Wikipedia page:

"A game show hostess in the tradition of the "glamorous assistant", she is the preeminent public intellectual of the [[liberal]] [[centre]] of British political thought." 

Might it have to be left up if enough people posted it? The Wikipedia entry is here.

Market Failure

I have just seen people going through the bins for food in the middle of the day in Durham Marketplace. 

If this is still happening in the January snow, Jeremy Corbyn, then it will be because you betrayed the Brexit in which, unlike Boris Johnson, you really did believe.

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

I am standing for Parliament here at North West Durham. The crowdfunding page is here, and buy the book here. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

"Right Policies, Wrong Leader"?

Labour would not have had these policies under any other Leader. Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall did not advocate them, and Owen Smith actively opposed them.

Sadly, most Labour MPs are still going to be like them rather than like Jeremy Corbyn, whose real failing is his timidity in the face of them, so that this manifesto is nowhere near radical enough.

But it is a good start. And another hung Parliament is coming, so that we need our people to hold the balance of power in it.

I am standing for Parliament here at North West Durham. The crowdfunding page is here, and buy the book here. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

Bye, Eck?

As Alex Salmond appears in court, take it from one who knows. Don't fall for that State trick, "If we pile on enough charges, then people will assume that he must be guilty of at least one of them." Don't fall for it.

No, Salmond was probably not planning a comeback against Nicola Sturgeon. But his faction and hers are locked in battle for control of the SNP. It is a fight to make those for control of the Conservative and Labour Parties look sedate. 

And it makes a workable deal between either of them and the SNP effectively impossible. Another hung Parliament is coming, however, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it.

I am standing for Parliament here at North West Durham. The crowdfunding page is here, and buy the book here. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

Powerless, Pointless Priti?

After nine and a half years in power, Priti Patel does not think that the Conservative Government is responsible for people's economic circumstances.

In that case, she clearly regards that Government as powerless, and thus as pointless.

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

I am standing for Parliament here at North West Durham. The crowdfunding page is here, and buy the book here. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

Case? Management?

Well, that was over in 10 minutes. Even the judge frankly could not understand why we were there. 

But it seems that the process has now gone on too long to be taken to anything other than its natural conclusion. 

So a fourth attempt at a trial will begin at Durham Crown Court on Monday 9th March. Three years after I was arrested. 

Three years. And still no evidence. None. At all.

In the meantime, my crowdfunding page is here, and buy the book here. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

Councillor Watch: Day 129

I hereby invite all Labour members of Durham County Council who believe me to be guilty of the criminal charges against me to email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com and say so.

I would not be able to reply to those emails, but every day the names of those who had sent them to me would appear here. So far, I have received none.

The Laura Pidcock Drugs Challenge: Day 164

I have never taken any illegal drug, and I challenge Laura Pidcock MP to say the same.

This post will appear here daily until it has received an answer.