Well and Truly Jannered

If I and all 413 of my supporters had voted Labour, and some of them would rather have died, then Richard Holden would still have beaten Laura Pidcock. In what sense did I stand against her, in particular? As much as anything else, my eventual candidacy for this seat had been universally expected here since she was a small child elsewhere.

And what if Laura had won? What would she have done? Would she have resigned the whip in solidarity with Jeremy Corbyn? No MP has done that, not even John McDonnell or Diane Abbott.

Nor would any of them do so if the Parliamentary Labour Party succeeded in banning him from ever again receiving the Labour whip, and thus from seeking reelection as a Labour candidate. Meanwhile, there would nothing in principle to prevent the war criminal Tony Blair from seeking election for Labour.

On what grounds are Corbyn's enemies, which is how they define their entire political identity, seeking to cast him into outer darkness after 38 years in the House of Commons and 56 in the Labour Party? The whole anti-Semitism business has been blown apart by the transition from open secret to openly stated fact in the case of Greville Janner.

Although his proclivities have been common knowledge for 70 years, Janner controlled the Board of Deputies for most of his life, and it is still run by people who owe their positions to his patronage. 

That influence fans out through and as the Jewish Leadership Council, the Community Security Trust, the Campaign Against Antisemitism, or any of that crowd, including the official Jewish media, including the Israeli Embassy, including the Jewish Labour Movement and Labour Friends of Israel, and including at least two of Janner's children.

Part of the Leicester machine of Sir Mark Henig, Janner handed over his Commons seat to Patricia Hewitt of the Paedophile Information Exchange, who had banned the use of the word "equality" by platform speakers at Labour Party Conferences.

The Hard Rights of both main parties, and the Cyril Smith wing that is dominant in economic policy terms within the Liberal Democrats, are so shot through with the sexual abuse of children that they are more or less defined by it. And like illegal drug use, sexual behaviour is never purely "private". Both of them open up the participants to the blackmail that is fundamental to political power in this country.

Moreover, the intellectual contortions necessary to justify them in the minds of those participants have vast philosophical and political consequences, taking those minds from a broadly Conservative or Labour position to an explicitly Thatcherite or Blairite one.

We saw an example today, with Stephen Doughty's attempt to score diazepam from a constituent. The first time that anyone ever heard of Doughty was when he resigned live on air from Corbyn's frontbench by arrangement with Laura Kuenssberg, who had thus manufactured her own news. Doughty would have dropped his trousers if he had been told to do so. He was that desperate for media approval.

On Politics Live on 7th October last year, Doughty told Kuenssberg that, "You know how these things work, the Government has a majority of 80," so there was no reason for the Opposition to turn up and vote on legislation. Well, in that case, then the Opposition ought not to be paid. At the very least, Short Money should be divided equally among those MPs who could indeed be bothered to provide an Opposition.

Intentionally or otherwise, and for all his faults, Jeremy Corbyn threatened to destroy that Blairite lifestyle by creating an economic order in which no one would have felt the need to become a drug mule, or a rent boy, or anything like that.

Therefore terrified of economic equality, such lifestyle liberals as the Equality and Human Rights Commission, which also had and has close ties to Janner's official circle, turned on Corbyn as no one had turned on any other British politician in living memory. And here we are.