Yesterday, the NUM had a meeting with the Irish machine in the North West, and that meeting decided that the latter's candidate, Rebecca Long-Bailey, rather than the former's, Ian Lavery, would be the Left's nominee to lead the Left-dominated Labour Party.
Effectively, that has appointed Rebecca Long-Bailey as the next Leader of the Labour Party. The miners and the Salford Irish dockers have spoken, and the absence of either mines or docks is immaterial. The brands still belong to somebody, the Left belongs to those people, and the Labour Party belongs to the Left. Jess who? Keir who?
But not "Lisa who?" There still needs to be a good first preference showing for Lisa Nandy, to put down certain markers, and to guarantee her a prominent role in the new order. Meanwhile, Angela Rayner has the Deputy Leadership in the bag. The first person ever to suggest to me that it ought to be, all the way back at Davey Hopper's funeral, was Richard Burgon.
As for Long-Bailey, she is the wrong choice. Lavery was opposed to a second referendum; like Burgon and like Jon Trickett, he almost certainly voted Leave, anyway. He understood why Labour had lost, and why he himself had very nearly lost his own seat, which would have given him real skin in the game at the next General Election. Long-Bailey's majority is still an enormous 16,327 in what is now her rather metropolitan and media-based constituency.
Long-Bailey appears not to understand that the point is not "You can't have a deterrent if you're not prepared to use it", but "If you're not prepared to use it, then you don't have a deterrent". Not even Donald Trump is currently nuking Iran. Not even Benjamin Netanyahu is currently doing so, even though Trump is his best bet ever for a President of the United States who would probably let him get away with it. It is all a very expensive bluff, and a morally repugnant one.
Long-Bailey accepts the IHRA Definition of Antisemitism, as unfortunately they all now do, although it is questionable whether Lavery really means it. That Definition is a thoroughgoing betrayal of the anti-racist and anti-imperialist struggle. It denies Black And Minority Ethnic, refugee and migrant experience in the way that leads to the Windrush scandal and to the fire at Grenfell Tower. And it denies the ancient indigenous Christian presence in the Holy Land, thereby contributing significantly to the worldwide persecution of Christians.
Yet Long-Bailey goes even further than that, and promises in advance to implement whatever is eventually recommended by the "Equality" and Human Rights Commission, which is a self-perpetuating oligarchy of Change UK donors and Israeli passport-holders with no interest in the economic equality without which there is no other, and with a history of sacking its black and disabled staff first.
The EHRC should be told in advance, not to expect obedience to its decrees, but to fuck off, since no other form of words will do. And then what? Come and have a go if you think you're harder than Ian Lavery, you people for whom the term "metropolitan liberal elite" could have been coined. Prison? "We survived the Strike, so do your worst."
Long-Bailey appears not to understand that the point is not "You can't have a deterrent if you're not prepared to use it", but "If you're not prepared to use it, then you don't have a deterrent". Not even Donald Trump is currently nuking Iran. Not even Benjamin Netanyahu is currently doing so, even though Trump is his best bet ever for a President of the United States who would probably let him get away with it. It is all a very expensive bluff, and a morally repugnant one.
Long-Bailey accepts the IHRA Definition of Antisemitism, as unfortunately they all now do, although it is questionable whether Lavery really means it. That Definition is a thoroughgoing betrayal of the anti-racist and anti-imperialist struggle. It denies Black And Minority Ethnic, refugee and migrant experience in the way that leads to the Windrush scandal and to the fire at Grenfell Tower. And it denies the ancient indigenous Christian presence in the Holy Land, thereby contributing significantly to the worldwide persecution of Christians.
Yet Long-Bailey goes even further than that, and promises in advance to implement whatever is eventually recommended by the "Equality" and Human Rights Commission, which is a self-perpetuating oligarchy of Change UK donors and Israeli passport-holders with no interest in the economic equality without which there is no other, and with a history of sacking its black and disabled staff first.
The EHRC should be told in advance, not to expect obedience to its decrees, but to fuck off, since no other form of words will do. And then what? Come and have a go if you think you're harder than Ian Lavery, you people for whom the term "metropolitan liberal elite" could have been coined. Prison? "We survived the Strike, so do your worst."
Unlike Lavery, it is far from clear that Long-Bailey is, when the chips are down, a Red rather than a Green, with an approach to climate change which protected and extended secure employment with civilised wages and working conditions, which encouraged economic development around the world, which upheld the right of the working classes and of nonwhite people to have children, which held down and as far as practicable reduced the fuel prices that always hit the poor hardest, and which refused to restrict travel opportunities or a full diet to the rich.
For all that she is a practising Catholic, it is far from clear that Long-Bailey rejects out of hand the notion that the problem with the world is that it has people in it, and celebrates instead the full compatibility between the highest view of human demographic, economic, intellectual and cultural expansion and development, and the most active concern for the conservation of the natural world and of the treasures bequeathed by such expansion and development in the past.
When Tony Blair expelled me from the Labour Party and banned me for life, then there was crowing that I was now more or less dead, since no life could exist outside "the party". Well, I am still here, and unlike several of them I am still politically active. I will be standing for Parliament again here at North West Durham next time, so please give generously. In any event, please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.
No comments:
Post a Comment