With a time indicative of the cabin fever that is sweeping the nation and the world, an email arrives from an old friend who is now a useful source fairly close to the Johnson-Cummings court. He and I both know how hard it is to get money out of rich people. Poor people are far easier, but we can all see the problem with that. Yet in terms of political influence rather than cold, hard cash, I am assured that The Centre is, "pushing at an open door."
This Government would have no quibble with any of the 10 founding principles, apparently. It has shelved gender self-identification after all the candidates to lead the Labour Party have gone and signed up to it. The Conservative Party has never subscribed to the IHRA Definition of Antisemitism, whereas such subscription is now a condition of mere membership of the Labour Party, and the opportunistic weaponisation of that issue against Jeremy Corbyn's party will end once Corbyn himself was no longer its Leader.
Beyond that, "Downing Street could have written" my 600 words. Gosh. Well, I will never again be a member of a political party, and I will never contest another election to anything. So of course I want to influence the Conservative Party. It has won most of the General Elections of the last 100 years, and it has at least come out on top at almost all of them, including the last four.
It currently has a huge majority, and it is bound to win again in 2024, which will give the whole of the Left the pleasure of turning to the Labour Right as I did locally in 2003 and answering "You're unelectable" with, "Well, so are you." Today has shown the Conservative Party with 54 per cent support at the polls, the highest that any Conservative Government has ever enjoyed.
By contrast, the next Leader of the Labour Party is going to be Keir Starmer. In the name of neoliberal economic policy, identitarian social policy, neoconservative foreign policy, and anti-industrial Malthusianism, that opaquely funded member of the Trilateral Commission will be the voice of all that was petty in the petty bourgeoisie, opposing investment along the Red Wall. Starmer will demand British participation in every war for which Saudi Arabia had paid the Democratic National Committee to cheerlead. Without a referendum, he wants to re-join the European Union on every term that it cared to set: Schengen, the euro, the lot.
As Director of Public Prosecutions, Starmer began the persecution of Julian Assange, he refused to bring charges in relation to the death of Jean Charles de Menezes, and he imported Joe Biden's mass incarceration of black men as a means of social control and as a source of cheap labour. Starmer's BAME supporters are drawn from the ageing Afro-Caribbean and South Asian Establishment that is integral to the right-wing Labour machine in certain urban areas. They are irrelevant to the BAME Britain of the 2020s. The Red Wall has not yet fully fallen, and the Black Wall will fall with it.
It is not that I am hostile in principle to influencing the Labour Party, although there will be no chance of that under Starmer. It is that it is simply more efficient to cut out the middle man. As a think-tank-cum-pressure-group, Labour has had a good run since the end of the First World War, and it is having a good run now. The only really dry patches have been the Thatcher years and the Coalition years, when the Conservatives looked instead to Liberalism (as Labour also did under Blair and will under Starmer, although that is another story).
But as an electoral force, Labour's record over the same period has been catastrophic, and it is not going to improve any time soon. I am not interested in exercising indirect influence. These are the facts of life. Love them or loathe them, but they are the facts of life. Please give generously.
This Government would have no quibble with any of the 10 founding principles, apparently. It has shelved gender self-identification after all the candidates to lead the Labour Party have gone and signed up to it. The Conservative Party has never subscribed to the IHRA Definition of Antisemitism, whereas such subscription is now a condition of mere membership of the Labour Party, and the opportunistic weaponisation of that issue against Jeremy Corbyn's party will end once Corbyn himself was no longer its Leader.
Beyond that, "Downing Street could have written" my 600 words. Gosh. Well, I will never again be a member of a political party, and I will never contest another election to anything. So of course I want to influence the Conservative Party. It has won most of the General Elections of the last 100 years, and it has at least come out on top at almost all of them, including the last four.
It currently has a huge majority, and it is bound to win again in 2024, which will give the whole of the Left the pleasure of turning to the Labour Right as I did locally in 2003 and answering "You're unelectable" with, "Well, so are you." Today has shown the Conservative Party with 54 per cent support at the polls, the highest that any Conservative Government has ever enjoyed.
By contrast, the next Leader of the Labour Party is going to be Keir Starmer. In the name of neoliberal economic policy, identitarian social policy, neoconservative foreign policy, and anti-industrial Malthusianism, that opaquely funded member of the Trilateral Commission will be the voice of all that was petty in the petty bourgeoisie, opposing investment along the Red Wall. Starmer will demand British participation in every war for which Saudi Arabia had paid the Democratic National Committee to cheerlead. Without a referendum, he wants to re-join the European Union on every term that it cared to set: Schengen, the euro, the lot.
As Director of Public Prosecutions, Starmer began the persecution of Julian Assange, he refused to bring charges in relation to the death of Jean Charles de Menezes, and he imported Joe Biden's mass incarceration of black men as a means of social control and as a source of cheap labour. Starmer's BAME supporters are drawn from the ageing Afro-Caribbean and South Asian Establishment that is integral to the right-wing Labour machine in certain urban areas. They are irrelevant to the BAME Britain of the 2020s. The Red Wall has not yet fully fallen, and the Black Wall will fall with it.
It is not that I am hostile in principle to influencing the Labour Party, although there will be no chance of that under Starmer. It is that it is simply more efficient to cut out the middle man. As a think-tank-cum-pressure-group, Labour has had a good run since the end of the First World War, and it is having a good run now. The only really dry patches have been the Thatcher years and the Coalition years, when the Conservatives looked instead to Liberalism (as Labour also did under Blair and will under Starmer, although that is another story).
But as an electoral force, Labour's record over the same period has been catastrophic, and it is not going to improve any time soon. I am not interested in exercising indirect influence. These are the facts of life. Love them or loathe them, but they are the facts of life. Please give generously.
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