Poison Berger

We all know about people with carefully cultivated reputations for niceness, and Luciana Berger is probably the worst of the lot. 

That Keir Starmer telephoned Berger on Thursday morning with advance notice of the EHRC report’s contents, as if she had not already known them, is grounds for his expulsion from the Labour Party. Or does he maintain such relations with everyone who was a Liberal Democrat candidate at last year’s General Election? That, of course, would be even stronger such grounds.

Berger has been known to shout her mouth off about me because I refer most casually to the common knowledge about how she was given the safe Labour seat of Liverpool Wavertree, namely as a reward for having had sex with Tony Blair's eldest son, admittedly a high price to have had to pay.

Well, Berger had no previous connection to Liverpool, so her lack of any connection to County Durham, beyond being a great-niece of Manny Shinwell’s, ought to present no obstacle to her contesting North West Durham as a Lib Dem in 2024. I am a declared and active Independent candidate for that seat. Please give generously.

Berger’s not uncontroversial accession to the Lib Dems was a key moment in the process that is now approaching completion, namely the most successful coup in Britain since 1688. Now, coups are the norm in Britain. It is vanishingly rare to become, rather than to remain, Prime Minister by leading a political party to an overall majority at a General Election. That last happened in 1997, having then last happened as long as 1979. But this is something else.

A foreign, and not even particularly friendly, state has pushed opinions that were well within the mainstream of all parties five and half years ago, so that they were always represented at every level of each of them, to the point where they are incompatible with mere membership of any party, and well on the way to full criminalisation. 

That criminalisation would not even require any formal change in the law. The dear old Crown Prosecution Service would just have to decide that any breach of the racist IHRA Definition was already racist, and that would be that.

All of this is in order to prevent any discussion of the possibility of economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends. To admit of that possibility is now not only to be an anti-Semite by definition, but also, within the Labour Party, to be an entryist. 

You may have been a Labour MP for 37 years, but a man who could not have been a member of any party eight years ago is entitled to call you an entryist and to kick you out for it. He may do that even though, in his official capacity as the Leader of the Labour Party, he is in close touch with at least one recent Lib Dem parliamentary candidate.

Labour has chosen to be the party of an economic and social liberalism that the use of soft power where possible but hard power where necessary had made unquestionable at home, so that the use of soft power where possible but very hard power where necessary could spread it across the whole wide earth by means of an unquestionable alliance between the European Union and the United States, an alliance with Britain at both its cultural and its military heart. 

And Labour has chosen to be the party of Thatcher’s Daughters, the public sector middle-class women who had been turned into the ruling class by the changes to the British economy since the Callaghan Government’s turn to monetarism in December 1976.

No one could encapsulate this more perfectly that Berger, and the Lib Dems have done themselves no credit by admitting her to membership. On the contrary, by so doing, they have made the same choice as Labour has, and they made it earlier. They need to consider her membership in light of her close relationship with Starmer.

But just as the Labour candidate at North West Durham is going to be the present Leader of Durham County Council, or else he is too frightened to face me, so the Lib Dem candidate is going to be Berger, or else she is also too frightened to face me. And in that case, then she should never say another word about me.