You all really are too kind, but as much as anything else, I shall be standing for Parliament later that year or very early in 2025. I hope that Alex Watson does not tell me to vote for anyone other than Jamie Driscoll, because then I would have a very difficult decision to make. That said, Labour is unlikely in the extreme to allow Jamie to be its candidate, while Alex is going to endorse someone, and the chances are vanishingly remote that that would not be good enough for me.
More broadly, though, while someone does have to be these things if they are there, directly elected mayors belong to the political cultures of presidential republics. We ought not to have them in Britain. And a quarter of a century of devolution has only ever further enriched and empowered the people who were already rich and powerful in the areas in question. Still, this is happening. Be on the bus, or be under it. Be at the table, or be on the menu.
There will be no referendum this time, but the Labour Party in County Durham is making exactly the arguments that I made 18 and more years ago against the regional assembly, sometimes against those very individuals. Hey, ho. Thankfully, we are heading for a hung Parliament. To strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty, we need to hold the balance of power. Owing nothing to either main party, we must be open to the better offer. There does, however, need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not.
Sure you won't do it?
ReplyDeleteAbsolutely certain.
DeleteYou’re a crank mate. In an earlier post, you said the Daily Telegraph (the most anti gender self-ID newspaper in Britain, even more than the Sun, Express, Daily Mail and Spectator) hired Suzanne Moore when she was fired by the Left because it couldn’t find anyone in its own side to oppose gender self identification. Which must be why all its star columnists wrote the below articles in opposition to it.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/12/20/dont-blame-dictionaries-redefining-women/
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/11/29/common-sense-finally-returning-trans-debate/
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/columnists/2021/06/22/essence-women-attack/
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/columnists/2022/07/06/trans-hype-gripping-schools-time-learnt-what-children-taught/
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/01/06/approach-gender-self-id-moral-outrage/
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/07/31/now-tavistock-clinic-closing-must-ask-where-does-trans-revolution/
None of them can tell you why. They have no theoretical basis. It is just "Ooh, it's a bit weird" until, as will very soon be the case, their public utterances catch up with their private lives and the corporate positions on which they are financially dependent.
DeleteRevelling in being anti-intellectual, while affecting to be an Edwardian country gent or lady, comes at this cost. If they see it as a cost. The people writing for the right-wing papers are doing it for a laugh. The Guardian may read like a stable of spoof columnists, but the people writing those articles truly believe every word, heaven help them. The right-wing papers are a conscious joke on their readers. If you doubt that, then you have never met almost any of the writers on them.
On topic, please.
You need to read more then: they tell you “why” in the articles I posted above. Of course they have a “theoretical basis”: the Right believes inequality is natural, (gender inequality included), because biology is unequal. This is a leftwing project, the final destination of the mad belief in total equality between men and women which must therefore deny any natural biological differences between them.
ReplyDeleteYou ought to read the rightwing press, or at least some books. Start with Roger Scruton or Maurice Cowling.
They are dead. And they were curiosities when they were alive. To say the least, none of those articles shows any sign of their influence. Not much ever did.
Delete