Tuesday 28 April 2020

Let Us Seem Humbler After It Is Done?

Judgement as to whether or not to bail Julian Assange because of the coronavirus has been delayed for at least six months because of the coronavirus. This is torture.

And secure in the knowledge that there was now no Opposition, Panorama felt able to tell the truth about PPE, or the lack of it. Its disclosures should have brought down the Government. But if there had been any risk of that, then it would never have made them.

No such risk exists. At 30.6, the average showing of Labour across its first seven polls under Keir Starmer is lower than the 31.6 that it managed across its first seven polls under Jeremy Corbyn in 2015. When is the coup going to start? Why has it not started already?

Perhaps because the Left has finally given up on the Labour Party. After 100 years, the Left does at last seem to have had enough of slogging its guts out for lazy, ungrateful, and ludicrously right-wing Councillors, MPs and Leaders.

What it will do next remains to be seen. But it has quite clearly had it with the Labour Party. And it is the Left that does the heavy lifting. Many right-wing luminaries are not really active party members. The idea of them delivering their own leaflets is laughable.

The anti-racist movement has also given up. It has only ever regarded Labour as the best of a very bad lot, and it has never regarded any Leader apart from Corbyn as a bona fide anti-racist, although it was under him that several stalwarts were expelled from the party.

But then came the recent leaked report, Starmer's reaction to it, and Starmer's own professional past and financial present. This time, it really is over. There is a world elsewhere. A world in which, although London alone will still return a majority of Labour MPs in 2024, it will return far fewer than there are now.

Problematic though Ofcom often is, it has done the right thing by finding in favour of Piers Morgan and his robust interrogation of clueless Ministers. Would that there were a Leader of the Opposition in the House of Commons, where someone is being paid to exercise that office while openly refusing, as a matter of principle, to do so.

How, then, to fill that position, which is vacant de facto? How to go about this will need to be worked out in detail, but we need to find a way of securing the signatures of, say, 100,000 parliamentary electors, including at least 100 in each Commons constituency, acknowledging a named individual as Leader of the Opposition, calling on the media to treat him or her as such, and undertaking to support in every way necessary such media as did so.

In the meantime, let nothing you dismay. The Budget of March 2020 has 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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