Good While It Lasted?

Was it good while it lasted? Or did it never last? Have we lost it? Or did we never have it?

Exactly the same political tendency, using different terminology on either side of the Atlantic but differing in no other way, has screwed over Bernie Sanders twice, is even now still giving daily kickings to Jeremy Corbyn just because he dares not to be dead yet, and has declared the American Presidential Election against Donald Trump even while votes are still being counted and even while litigation remains imminent.

Any aspiration to economic populism and to foreign policy restraint is now "Trumpian", and thus "racist" or "misogynist" or any other boo word that you happened to fancy, in the way that any aspiration to economic equality and to international peace is now "Corbynite", and thus "anti-Semitic".

That latter is truly extraordinary. Views that on the day of the 2015 General Election were so mainstream that they would have been represented in the Cabinet whatever the outcome, are now incompatible with mere membership of any political party, and await only a test case to establish that, without any specific legislation in the last five years, they were already criminal. A foreign state has pulled this off. It is breathtaking.

Brexit hangs in the balance, with Boris Johnson, who has never really believed in it, preparing to sign up to a deal so bad that reaccession would be preferable to such vassal statehood. Reaccession would be on any terms that the EU cared to set. Schengen, the euro, the lot. 

Johnson knows that not only would most Conservative MPs always vote for whatever any Conservative Prime Minister had put in front of them, but, as a step towards Schengen and the euro, the SNP, Plaid Cymru, the SDLP, the Alliance Party, the Greens, the Liberal Democrats, and most of the Parliamentary Labour Party would also vote for his deal, or at the very least not vote against it.

After all, not a single one of any of those voted against his second lockdown, and most of them voted in favour of it, even though it had been imposed too late, even though that meant that it would last far longer than it ought to have done, and even though the intention after four weeks was to return to the tier system, with its favouritism towards London, the South East, and the places that had been returning Conservative MPs since time immemorial rather than only since 2019. So much for the areas that had decided the 2016 referendum, the 2017 General Election, and the 2019 General Election.

There is plenty wrong with Sanders. There is plenty wrong with Corbyn. There is plenty wrong with Trump. There was plenty wrong with both of the Leave campaigns. But for a brief, golden period, there was hope for an economy not exclusively focused on the interests of global finance, and therefore for a foreign policy of peace.

Or was there? Those who have brought down Sanders, Corbyn and Trump, and who are on the cusp of turning Brexit into its opposite, always retained their vast economic, social, cultural and political power. That has been how they have been able to stage their coup.

All along the  Red Wall, to which there has been absolutely no transfer of wealth or power but if anything the reverse, they control the councils that will be counting the votes that will make the difference between the coup-completing coronation of Keir Starmer, and not. 

Therefore, between now and 2024, it is absolutely imperative that Labour lose control of those councils. Ward by ward, vote for whoever was best-placed to defeat the Labour Party. And I am a declared and active candidate for the parliamentary seat of North West Durham at the next General Election. Please give generously.