Unfair To Kangaroos?

Has John Bercow been suspended from the Labour Party? People have been expelled for far less. So much, then, for the hope that he might contest North West Durham in that interest, since no one else wants to.

The party that holds this seat is happy to have me on the ballot paper, but the party that still thinks that it owns this seat is planning to go to court to keep me off it, pursuant to the Elections Bill that was given its Third Reading in the House of Commons this evening.

Most Labour MPs voted against that Bill, and by little less than a miracle none of them voted in favour of it, but back when it ran councils the right-wing Labour machine was very fond of invoking the Thatcher anti-union laws, and here we go again.

The thing is, though, that my campaign would be happening even if my candidacy did not. Even if I were in prison. Perhaps even if I were dead. It is just that it would be a campaign for abstention, and since more people will not vote than will vote for the winning candidate, then I could claim forever to have been victorious. The last time that I was in prison, then the people who had sent me there put a hit on me, but the hitman took such a liking to me that he gave them their money back. As my campaign literature is going to say.

Whatever the objective of my campaign, then I would have the Labour candidate beaten from the start on race. White? The candidate for people who just did not want a mixed-race MP. Black? A comical attempt to out-colour me. Somewhere in between? Some variation on either of those. Exactly my skin tone, with a name exactly as WASP-y as David Alexander Stephen Lindsay? A mere tribute act, the candidate who was as much like me as possible without being me. Any of those ways, I win. I intend to do something very similar on class.

In a constituency that began no more than five miles from Durham Crown Court, my election literature will say that the jury in my case had been selected and controlled by the right-wing Labour machine that had then been still in control of Durham County Council and of which the Labour candidate was by definition a member, and that that was an undisputed matter of record unless and until at least one juror publicly denied it. Again, this campaign would go ahead even if my candidacy did not.

And so on. In 2017, the only person to sign the Labour candidate's nomination papers and ever to have been elected above Parish level had become a County Councillor mere days before he must have signed them. In 2019, whereas my proposer had been Deputy Leader of Durham County Council, no one who signed the Labour candidate's nomination papers had ever been elected above Parish level, if at all.

This time, in view of the campaign that I am certainly going to run no matter what, will anyone dare put their names to such documentation, since there would be no law against publishing their home addresses and what these days would probably be their easily obtainable photographs? As one who might have been asked has already put it to me, "Speedboat, it's our own fault you've now got marras from the lowest places in the North East to the lowest places in the Middle East."

I am 44, five foot nine, 12 stone, and a cripple. I have spent nearly five years insisting that no one could be intimidated by me; that anyone who might be would be incapable of functioning in normal society. But if the Labour Party is frightened of me, to the point that no one in it will even dare to stand against me for Parliament, then that is just another of the myriad reasons not to vote for it.