Sunday, 29 March 2020

This Time Next Week

This time next week, the Leader of the Labour Party will be a man whose campaign had received at least one donation of £100,000 from a single individual.

It has spent far more than that, but it refuses to tell us where the rest of its money has come from. Of the hundred grand, though, we do know. Do you know any single individual who makes donations of that size to anything? No, neither do I. Welcome to the world of Keir Starmer.

Starmer began the persecution of Julian Assange, who is globally the most significant of the many and multiplying Dreyfuses that his neoliberal, identitarian, neoconservative and Malthusian position is creating as it lashes out in the throes its dying panic: Alex Salmond, Roger Stone, Cardinal Pell, and so on.

Rape Crisis Scotland has issued a collective statement by the nine conspirators against Salmond, all of them prominent in the circles around the Scottish Government, and one of them directly responsible for providing Rape Crisis Scotland with most of its income.

Their conspiracy included a WhatsApp group, and politically it is still going on. Covid-19 is the only reason why Nicola Sturgeon is still in her job. For different reasons, the same may be said of Arlene Foster. And the rates of death from Covid-19 in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland bespeak the fatal failure of devolution.

The fact that Starmer was a former Director of Public Prosecutions, and especially his record in the case of Jean Charles de Menezes, was terrifying enough to us darkies, and enough to inspire the hope that this year's Labour Party Conference would be given the reception by Liverpool that the Democratic National Convention was given by Chicago in 1968. 

Or that the Democratic Convention ought to be given by Milwaukee in 2020, where it is going to nominate Strom Thurmond's eulogist, a man who opposed bussing for fear that his children might "grow up in a racial jungle", and the man who reintroduced the federal death penalty while promoting the mass incarceration of such black men as might nevertheless have been left alive. 

For most of its history, the Democratic Party has been the most successful white supremacist organisation ever. This year, it is reverting to the type from which it has never entirely departed. And how. It is going to nominate for President of the United States the man who brought back lynching. At least he is not going to win.

Nor, of course, is Starmer going to win in 2024. That would be psephologically impossible. But Jeremy Corbyn's complete shift of the economic debate over the last five years demonstrates quite how influential it is possible to be, and Starmer will have vastly more favourable media coverage than Corbyn ever enjoyed.

Moreover, there is talk of Rachel Reeves, who thinks that we disabled people are abnormal and undeserving, as Shadow Chancellor, with a prominent position for Yvette Cooper, who systematically tried to exterminate us when she was Secretary of State for Work and Pensions.

When it came to those of us who were both BAME and disabled, then Starmer, Reeves and Cooper in power would slaughter us like the pigs that they themselves were, and even out of power they would set a tone under which we would be in constant mortal danger. This time next week, that looks set to be our reality.

In the name of neoliberal economic policy, identitarian social policy, neoconservative foreign policy, and anti-industrial Malthusianism, Starmer will turn Labour into the party, or with the Liberal Democrats one of the two parties, of well-heeled, white, liberal hypocrisy in England and Wales; the SNP has cornered that market in Scotland.

Such Kammites infest everywhere, but in how many constituencies are there really enough of them to make a parliamentary candidate the First Past the Post? 20 in London and 20 outside? There or thereabouts, and the Lib Dems already hold at least six of those seats, while the Greens hold a seventh.

But even under better Leadership than Starmer or than whoever was about to take over from Jo Swinson, the Labour Party and the Lib Dems, like the Liberal Party before it, are really combinations of the think tank and the pressure group. Neither of them has been without considerable success in influencing the party that usually wins General Elections and which is almost always led by the Prime Minister.

There is nothing wrong in principle with seeking to influence them in their turn. But it is inefficient. Why go through a middle man? The Budget of March 2020, and the Government's response to the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic, have ended the era that began with the Budget of December 1976. The Centre is the think tank for this new era. Please give generously.

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