Friday 3 July 2020

Use Your Power, As We Are Doing

If at least 300,000, and possibly three million, people from Hong Kong can be rushed into this country and fast-tracked to British citizenship, then what about the victims of the Windrush scandal? And when is there going to be justice for the Chagossians? 

This is pure posturing in the New Cold War that shifts its enemy between China and Russia as it suits the Biden-Starmer interest at any given time. Why is Boris Johnson having any part in this?

Although notice that it cannot apply to people born after the handover but who are no longer dependants, the 18 to 23-year-olds who have been doing the demonstrating. Or are we going to do this whenever that age group demonstrated anywhere in the former British Empire? Do those who are making an admittedly impotent fuss about Hong King tend to approve of such protests when they happen in Britain?

There is also going to be very generous provision, as there ought to be, for EEA citizens who wished to remain in Britain. So the Windrush question is going to come up again. But the victims need no more look to the Labour Party than should the people who were now going to be subject to benefit sanctions even if they had Covid-19, which BAME people are more likely to contract.

Never mind Starkey. Starmer is as desperate as this. This is the racism story in British politics today. The racism of Keir Starmer and the Labour Party, and the refusal of black people to put up with it any longer. Mass BAME abstention, or votes for locally organised BAME Independents, could deprive scores of liberal elite stalwarts of the metropolitan seats that, even after the fall of the Red Wall, everyone had assumed would be Labour forever.

And yes, that is intimately bound up with those metropolitan liberal elite MPs' support for Israel, since one's approach to the Palestinian struggle is the litmus test of one's attitude to white violence against people of colour throughout the world, including in Britain.

"I used to be the Director of Public Prosecutions" plays better with some people than it does with others, and not only on this forty-ninth birthday of Julian Assange, although there is certainly that. When Black Lives Matter called Starmer "a cop in an expensive suit", then the word in the first draft will not have been "cop". He cannot help it, but Starmer does have a head that looks as if it could be studded with cloves and marinated in cider before being basted with honey and roasted. Gammon, indeed. He used to be the Director of Public Prosecutions, you know.

The need to hold the Red Wall, and the desire to expand the gains here, have already caused Johnson to repudiate his seven most recent predecessors, four of whom were from his own party and one of whom was Margaret Thatcher, in order to promise as much as possible of the economic programme for which these areas voted in 2017, when Jeremy Corbyn were still holding the Bennite line on Brexit.

Johnson has as good as said the words that we were run down as a matter of government policy for 40 years and under all three parties, causing us to cast the decisive votes for Brexit in 2016, to vote for Corbyn and John McDonnell in such numbers as to deliver a hung Parliament in 2017, and then to give him his overall majority in 2019 because Corbyn had given in to Starmer over Brexit.

Oodles of central government intervention in our economy are coming, pretty much as we direct, without reference to the corrupt and incompetent right-wing Labour machine that we are going to wipe off the municipal map next year, and paid for by an acceptance of the principle of Modern Monetary Theory. Corbyn and McDonnell could never get that one through the many committees of the Labour Party, but the Conservative Party has none of that. The Leader's word is law.

What a thing it is to have power. We should have seized it a very long time ago. And as the Red Wall has made itself a belt of key swing voters in key swing seats, so the Black Wall can do the same. Starmer had lost Labour a million Kashmiri votes, and now there is everything else about him as well, all of which was always going to happen.

Far from Labour's regaining seats up here that it had lost in 2019, there will be as many Red Wall losses again to the Conservatives in 2024. In addition to that, imagine the results of mass BAME abstention, or of votes for local Independents organised by mosques, black churches, black community organisations, and so on. There could be the biggest Conservative majority since before the War.

But Johnson and his party know that they have to talk the talk and walk the walk in order to retain the Red Wall. They need to be made to know the same thing about the Black Wall. Not only in passing is it worth mentioning that Grenfell Tower is in a seat that the Conservatives hold by a mere 150 votes. Use your power, as we are doing. The Budget of March 2020 has ended the era that began with the Budget of 1976. The Centre is the think tank for this new era. It already has plenty going on. Use your power, as we are doing.

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