If You Want My Future, Forget My Past?

"Keir Starmer seems to be viewed as "electable" by Labour members largely because he looks like someone playing a Prime Minister in an old Spice Girls video," says Frankie Boyle, and of course he is right. 

The racism that the Labour report has laid bare has always been fundamental to Blairism. Starmer owes his elevation to having been the only upper-middle-class, white man in the race. No BAME candidate has ever placed higher than last in any Labour Leadership Election.

Everyone now knows about NF. I have waited a very long time for this. Nothing would persuade me back into contesting elections, which is why I am not going to be joining a party again, but if Ossie Johnson really did retire next year (and I'll still believe it when I see it), then I would love to see NF try and take the male and Rightist spot alongside the fairly leftish Jude Considine.

He could not possibly do any less well than he did the last time, in 2003. But would Jude have him as a running mate? I very much doubt it now. Talk about damaged goods. And gone are the days when Ossie could put him on the ticket without the indignity of a selection meeting.

Yes, you read aright. When a sitting Labour Councillor retired in Lanchester in 2003, then there was no process to select a potential replacement. The opportunity was automatically given to the MP's racist, pleb-despising, warmongering, Shotley Bridge Hospital-hating, football-loving, Radio One-listening, fashionably attired and coiffured tea boy. Not that he looks like a pop star now. Lockdown or no lockdown, do not cut your own hair.

The result was predictable. And it would have been enjoyable, if he had not taken one of the best of men down with him. But NF was still made Chairman of the Parish Council as a consolation prize. In his first term as an elected member.

Come on, NF, I dare you. Give it another go 18 years, an electoral generation, after your last one. Which would be more amusing? Jude's refusal to have you on the ticket? Or the Branch's refusal to select you, anyway? Or the electorate's second, and even more decisive, rejection of you? Then again, how much chance is there that you will still be a member of the Labour Party this time next year? All BAME MPs should threaten to resign the whip unless you were expelled.

Not that any of this is anything more than an amusing diversion. The Budget of March 2020, together with the Government's response to the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic, have ended the era that began with the Budget of December 1976. The Prime Minister calls the National Health Service "the beating heart of this country". The Centre is the think tank for this new era. Please give generously.