Behind The Paywall

Keir Starmer is not writing behind the paywall of The Times today. Today, he is writing behind the paywall of the Daily Telegraph. He makes no bones about who he does not want to reach. 

There is delight in all the usual circles that the unions are coming round to the realisation that they are being decidedly overcharged for what must be the true cost of mere abstention. Free of them, Labour could instead become a party of, well, what, exactly?

The money would come exclusively from a tiny clique of megarich individuals who could easily afford to pay the real Living Wage to unionised staff but who preferred practically enslaved illegal immigrants instead, and in whose circles small matters such as the drug laws and the age of consent had always been ignored.

The London version, in fact, of the people who funded and ran the Conservative Party. Although those also keep a place in Town, just as these also keep at least one place in the Country. The two networks are connected through private schools, through the trade in illegal drugs, and in numerous other ways besides. Unsurprisingly, their political opinions are exactly the same.

What do the people who want a Starmer Government want it to do, that would not happen under what was ostensibly the other side? Their list of past Labour achievements sets out social changes that would have happened at those historical junctures no matter who had been in government. The Conservative Party, as such, did not oppose them, and nor did any more than a handful of MPs of any party. 

Most of those changes received almost no media coverage at the time. For example, one has to scour the specialist Catholic press for much mention of the 1969 Divorce Reform Act. Or for almost any mention of the 1967 Abortion Act, which passed with near unanimity despite the fact that its full ramifications had been made clear by its opponents, such as there were. 

Until the 1980s, the good or bad reputation of Roy Jenkins depended on his time as Chancellor of the Exchequer. Only then did the Conservatives decide to shift attention to his record as Home Secretary, and specifically to measures that they themselves had enthusiastically supported at the time. They made no attempt to repeal any of them.

Not only do they always support these things, but on returning to office they always surpass them. One of Margaret Thatcher's last acts as Prime Minister was to legalise abortion up to birth. She had fought Victoria Gillick to the bitter end for the right to give underage girls abortion and contraception without parental knowledge, never mind parental consent. "Gillick competence" is in fact Thatcher competence. 

The 2019 and subsequent intakes of Conservative MPs regard the introduction of same-sex marriage as the founding event of the party of which many of them had not previously been members. Whereas the Blair and Brown Governments had always specifically ruled out same-sex marriage, an editorial in favour of it had appeared within a few days of the 1997 General Election. In the Daily Telegraph. There was no such concept as gender self-identification 10 years ago, and we have certainly not heard the last of it.

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