All Or Nothing

Free school meals in the holidays existed in the 1960s, although sometimes you had to go to another school in order to eat them. Every MP who voted tonight against restoring them is fed and watered very generously indeed at public expense, despite also drawing a salary of £81,932. No doubt they are being fed and watered right now.

The imminent attempt to put the North East into Tier Three on the same terms as Greater Manchester and South Yorkshire will be the test of whether the Red Wall stood on the cusp of cultural and political dominance for the rest of this century, or stood on the cusp of secession as part of a wider dissolution of the United Kingdom.

We decided the EU referendum for Leave, we would have put Jeremy Corbyn into Downing Street if his own staff had not sabotaged him, and we gave Boris Johnson an overall majority of 80 because while Corbyn was still anti-austerity enough for us, he had sold out to Keir Starmer over Brexit. The culture and polity that Johnson and Starmer embody can either conform to us, or it cannot accommodate us at all. We are days away from finding out which it is to be.

"This time. Maybe this time with all this much to lose than all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory the desperate gamble, the cast made two years ago; or to anyone who ever sailed a skiff under a quilt sail, the moment in 1492 when somebody thought This is it: the absolute edge of no return, to turn back now and make home or sail irrevocably on and either find land or plunge over the world's roaring rim."

People in 1492 did not in fact believe that the world had a rim, but let that pass for now. For the golden dome of Washington itself, substitute the dome of Saint Paul's Cathedral, right there in the City of London. It is not golden, but then nor is that of Washington. Once it were under Northern control, then it would be well and truly blung up.

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