Never Had It So Good?

As Northern Rail becomes this Government's first renationalisation, but certainly not its last, then the impending liberation of this country from the EU's State Aid rules and other such constraints is already having a practical effect.

What with this, and the proposals for huge levels of investment here along the former Red Wall, then the Government's domestic policy is starting to have the feel of the last notable period when the electorally determinative votes were those of the fifth of the working class that did not always vote Conservative, but which could be persuaded to do so.

That period was the 1950s, when public ownership of the railways and of numerous other things was as much a fact of life as huge levels of public investment in, well, more or less everything, all unconstrained by any suprantional body.

As for this Government's foreign policy, it turns out that we need to look back even further. Notice that not even so much as one Parliamentary Private Secretary has resigned over Huawei. Before the War, Conservatives used "Anglo-American" as a term of abuse for their own fringe, dissident MPs. Another such term was "glamour boy". Nobody is going to call Iain Duncan Smith a glamour boy. Nor David Davis, who has not hitherto been much of an Anglo-American, either.

But to what must be nearly universal surprise, Downing Street's once and future columnist on the Daily Telegraph is full of the spirit of the Morning Post when it comes to Huawei, to Iran, to Anne Sacoolas, at least implicitly to Prince Andrew, and very explicitly to taxing the tech giants. Johnson has even moved Julian Assange out of solitary confinement, which is a clear indication of an eventual intention to release him. Take that, Keir Starmer.

And take that, Mike Pompeo, who has arrived in a Britain with its most anti-American Government in living memory. This Government is made up of the successors, and indeed of the descendants, of the men who saw the American Republic as the greatest enemy of the British Empire right up until there had ceased to be a British Empire, and sometimes even after that.

Over on the other side, the Liberal Democrats are holding the pro-Washington line, since their own antecedents are in refusal to join a new formation with Tories in it, and refusal to remain in an old formation with Tony Benn and Michael Foot in it. John Nicolson's personal position is explicable in terms of his ties to Daniel Patrick Moynihan, but that of the SNP in general deserves further examination. That party does, after all, aspire to its own 1776 moment of bourgeois revolution. This is one to watch.

But Labour is making no fuss, and not only those who remain on what is still Jeremy Corbyn's front bench. On Newsnight, even Kevan Jones, the right-wing Labour machine personified, was saying that we had to take the best technology on offer until we got back to making our own. Again, back to the 1950s, and to the world before the War. Back to Britain as an industrial and technological powerhouse, free from the EU's State Aid rules and from other such constraints.

Not that all was well with that Britain. It was the Britain of Ernest Marples, and of the refusal to prosecute him on the part of an organisation that has since been headed by Keir Starmer. There, the dark side of that Britain is still in effect.

Starmer is making much of his role in having pursued MPs over their expenses, and journalists over phone hacking. But on expenses, so to speak, he stuck to the Poulson Principle of prosecuting the Labour but not the Conservative politicians who were involved in the same scandal. And on phone hacking, he deliberately constructed so weak a case against Rupert Murdoch's favourite that she was bound to be acquitted. Lo and behold, Starmer is now touted as a potential Prime Minister. Funny, that.

Still, no matter who had become the Leader of the Labour Party or anything else, 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.