Blood From A Stone?

It would take a heart of stone not to laugh. Hundreds of selections would be merrily rigged in order to ensure that most Labour MPs would be hardline Thatcherites, so that no matter who you voted for, nothing would ever change, or at least nothing would ever change for the better. For 25 years, that worked. But it assumed that most Conservative MPs would also be hardline Thatcherites, or at least that their party would always be led by such. 

Instead, though, the General Election of 2019 gave a thumping great majority to a Government that had presented no economic programme to the electorate, but which turned out to have broadly the economic programme of Jeremy Corbyn's disappointed critics to his left within and, increasingly as his Leadership wore on, beyond the Labour Party. A Government that owed its majority to seats that had voted for Corbyn when he had still been committed to Brexit, and which would have done so again if he had retained that commitment.

So Labour prepares to give its Leadership to Keir Starmer, the idea of whom as a potential Prime Minister is an outright obscenity on this anniversary of the death of Ian Tomlinson, and Starmer prepares to give the Shadow Chancellorship to that bestial eugenicist, Rachel Reeves. But who cares? Economically, this is the most left-wing Government since the month in which I must have been conceived, December 1976. And up here on the newly Blue Wall, we are loving the lengths to which the Conservatives will go to stop us from painting the towns Red again.

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.