The Madhouse No More

"I'm not mad, I'm a Member of Parliament," was a line that brought a smile to many of our faces, although one struggles to see why it amused those who thought that only Labour MPs should have any say in electing the Leader, even if they did also believe that those MPs were so lacking in talent that people who had never even voted Labour, if at all, needed to be brought in to "refresh" the Parliamentary Labour Party.

But Claudia Webbe is magnificent in her determination to continue to sit and vote while on bail awaiting sentence. She has not submitted to her lynching by Keir Starmer in order to give the seat of Leicester East back to Keith Vaz, who has continued to maintain two staffed offices there in competition with hers. Who is paying for those?

Starmer's Leadership Campaign raised just over £700,000, of which £580,000 came from a mere 35 individuals, one of whom, the barrister Robert Latham, gave £100,000. There are some very deep pockets here. And Vaz has been maintaining two staffed offices in his former constituency while it has had a Left MP whom Starmer has arranged to send to prison. Talk about a party within a party.

Then again, they might reasonably say that they were the party now. 37 people will soon be a high proportion of the total membership of the Labour Party. A founding trade union has disaffiliated during Conference, literally walking out in the middle of a session. Labour now belongs exclusively to those who worship at the altar of the Government that deliberately widened the gap between rich and poor in order to "punish" those who had "not tried hard enough" at "education, education, education", itself defined in the crudely anti-intellectual terms of the lumpenbourgeoisie.

That programme of permanent austerity at home and forever war abroad will be roundly rejected by the electorate at the next General Election. As it must be. In order to be so defeated, then Starmer must remain Leader even after the Leicester East by-election has been won by, therefore, the only MP ever to have been elected specifically as a Modern Monetary Theorist, specifically as a Lexiteer, and specifically as an opponent of, among other things, vaccine passports, gender self-identification, and the IHRA Definition. Take however deep a breath you need to take, and let's get George Galloway back where he belongs.