Free To Fight For Working People

Andy McDonald has been forced to resign rather than argue against a minimum wage of £15 per hour, and against statutory sick pay at the Living Wage; the real Living Wage, of course, not the Government's purely nominal one. Just think about that. Statutory sick pay at the Living Wage is what the Labour Party now opposes.

Once you have lost the Soft Left, then you have lost the Labour Party. Keir Starmer will be Leader until the General Election, which he would have lost anyway, but his Leadership of the Labour Party has for all practical purposes ended this week. No one any longer cares what, if anything, he thinks, says or does.

Starmer has ruled out the nationalisation of the energy companies, a hugely popular policy that is going to be overwhelmingly so after this winter. Is he still going to be holding that line when the Government has done it, having worked out that it was cheaper and easier than whatever else they might have had to do with them? He is going to look very stupid either way.

Labour has hardly ever won a General Election, and never against a serious attempt by the Conservatives to stop it. It has, however, been known to suggest things that, after having called them every name under the Sun and The Sun, Conservative Governments have then implemented because they were so obviously commonsensical.

Ed Miliband's energy cap was one such, much of Jeremy Corbyn's 2017 and 2019 manifestos will turn out to have been, and another has perhaps been proposed today by someone called Rachel Reeves. Phasing out business rates, by taxing the windfalls that the tech giants have made from Covid-19, is an idea with legs. It is very good think tank stuff. But Labour does not purport to be a think tank, as which it might be quite effective. Even against almost all historical evidence, it purports to be a potential party of government.

Therefore, Reeves aspires to be "Britain's first Green Chancellor". How unfair to the present Chancellor of the Exchequer. The thing about Insulate Britain and its Extinction Rebellion parent is that they are campaigning, apparently now to the point of risking incarceration, for something that they already have. 

But it is the lot of the Conservative Party to be disbelieved by foe and friend alike. No matter what it really does to demonstrate its true character, then its supporters and its opponents unite in insisting that it is really something else entirely. It is not.

And just as we already have a Government of Green zealots who accurately point out that the whole thing was pioneered by Margaret Thatcher's deindustrialisation in general and by her destruction of the coal industry in particular, so we already have the Government under which the entire concept of gender self-identification has emerged.

No one had heard of it on the last day of Gordon Brown's Premiership, and very few on the last day of Nick Clegg's Deputy Premiership. Yet today, it is a fact of life across the entire public sector and for everyone who does business with the State. Without anything so vulgar as a parliamentary vote, of course.

If you are here in North West Durham and you want an MP who will fight for a minimum wage of £15 per hour, statutory sick pay at the real Living Wage, publicly owned energy companies, and the rights of women and girls based on the fact of biological sex, then please vote for me. If you are anywhere and you want there to be at least one MP like that, then please give any assistance that you can, by contacting davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.