Use The Force?

"You are on this Council, but we do not grant you the rank of Master." Even at his age, Jeremy Corbyn might still become a Sith Lord in retaliation for having been so snubbed. The Labour Hard Right should have been told that if it felt like walking out yet again, then it knew where the door was. Where is the National Labour Organisation now? Where is the original SDP now? Where is Change UK now?

Everyone who continues to receive the Labour whip approves of the treatment of Corbyn. Laura Pidcock is now guaranteed to be the Labour candidate here at North West Durham, so she needs to be asked why she wanted the Labour whip when Corbyn did not have it, in addition to being asked why she wanted Keir Starmer to become Prime Minister. More pressingly, Richard Holden needs to be asked why he wanted the country to continue to be run by Carrie Symonds.

For 11 lost months, this was a key swing seat. But the political and media elite picks which those are going to be. It decides to which voters it is going to pitch. The rest of us can just get lost. Neither Symonds nor Starmer goes anywhere beyond the reach of what used to be Network SouthEast, and not even all of that. They struggle with anywhere that does not have a Tube station. Not that they take the Tube, baffled as they are that anyone drives taxis when it is so much more convenient to ride in the back of them.

Corbyn ruined his own chances by caving in to Starmer over Brexit, by indulging the gender self-identification nutters when he should have been reading the Morning Star a bit more, and by adopting the IHRA Definition. All three of those are now being put into practice by Symonds. Breach of the IHRA Definition is probably already a criminal offence; we are just waiting for a test case. The corporate and public sectors, which have been barely distinguishable for decades, are already applying gender self-identification as an uncontroversial fact of life. And Brexit? What Brexit?

We adopted the popular culture of the United States, so we have ended up with the politics of those parts of the United States which produce popular culture. Three parties out of three in England, four out of four in Scotland, and four out of four in Wales, are branch offices of the Democratic Party as it exists in New York and California, from gender fluidity to an unquestionable Zionism that prioritises Jewish experience over politically black experience.

Known or unknown to the readers, there are more people writing national columns for British newspapers from the United States, mostly New York City, than there are from all 72 Red Wall constituencies put together. And do not give me any guff about "cancel culture". Some of us have never known anything else. The people who noisily bang on about freedom of speech these days had absolutely no interest in it when they themselves were doing the cancelling.

At Prime Minister's Questions, Gareth Davies was right to call for a National Development Bank. But Boris Johnson waffled it out. Neither party wants to know about that kind of thing anymore. I need an illustrator for my children's book about a squirrel, The Adventures of Princess Nut Nuts. If you were any good, then I might keep you on for my children's book about a chipmunk, The Adventures of Princess Pidcock. I am also a declared and active Independent candidate for the parliamentary seat of North West Durham at the next General Election. I can hear you laughing. But I cannot see you doing anything better.