Together With Reactionary Circles?

Not only the twentieth anniversary of the death of John Peel, but the centenary of the Zinoviev letter, too. The latter is being marked, in "My old mum always referred to the Daily Mail as the Forgers' Gazette" terms, by types who pulled the same trick every day for nearly five years, and who still reprise it at least once a week. Although they cannot bring themselves to admit it out loud, they look at this Government, and they realise what they have done.

Since the General Election, Labour has lost 35 per cent of the council seats that it has defended. Those of us who vote even in local by-elections, vote in absolutely everything. We see a Government that wants five more freeports, and which pays court to those who were suing it over even so much as Michael Gove's reforms to leasehold. And those are just today. There are several things like this every day.

From the moment that Rachel Reeves emerged from wherever it was that she did, then I have been telling you that the official version of her CV was impossible. In the meantime, she has also become a proven plagiarist. Her career ought to be over. But the freeports and leasehold brigade want her, so she is safe. Reeves is a published and unrepentant plagiarist with a lying CV that specifically claims that she had been an economist at a major bank when in fact she had been the economists' administrative assistant. She is also the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Yes, really. Plenty of Chancellors have had no economics background as such. But none of them has lied about it.

And there is a lot to be said for giving these positions to people who had proudly been Poor Bloody Infantry in their time. Such might be known as "working people". You may very well be a working person and an asset-holder, but being a landlord or a shareholder does not make you a working person. Nor does being retired from work mean that you have ceased to be one in a structural sense, so that you now deserved to have your Winter Fuel Payment taken away.

At least in Europe, only in Britain would any of this have to be said, because only in Britain have we had 45 years, 30 of them as a matter of cross-party consensus unless you counted a Leadership that most Labour MPs actively opposed, during which these matters were presented in purely personal rather than structural terms. Both in taking their case to the Court of Session that the abolition of the universal Winter Fuel Payment had been unlawful, and in doing so on their stated grounds, Peter and Florence Fanning are obviously still members of the working class.

The white working class, if you like. I cannot see how any reparations are owed in respect of those slightly more than half of my own ancestors, although the rest did include, among others, all three of African slaves, Indian indentured labourers, and Chinese coolies. Like all Saint Helenians, all Afro-Caribbeans are mixed-race. Moreover, in this country, 50 per cent of children with an Afro-Caribbean parent have a white parent. There is a lot to be considered here. Whereas the case for an apology is unanswerable, and Keir Starmer would presumably know how to draft one that did not open up anyone to financial liability. But the Atlantic slave trade was the foundation of capitalism, so Starmer cannot say that there had been anything wrong with it when Britain had done it, if at all. He has been called to the Bar in several Caribbean countries. Over to them.

As on the Winter Fuel Payment, Labour is being outflanked on the left by the Conservatives. Self-identifying Rightists who would wish to hold the line against an apology, should ponder that they had lost all three of the King, the Church of England, and the Tory Party. They are unlikely to care, though. Sharing Starmer's dismissal of historical considerations, they are more like Jacobins than Tories. They would guillotine the King, with whom they agree about practically nothing, if they thought that that would "Stop The Boats" or what have you.

When the old Queen was alive, then Richard Tice said repeatedly that she ought to be succeeded by President Farage. The abolition of the "woke" and "Green" monarchy was the stated policy of Laurence Fox's Reclaim Party. These days, the preferred Head of State would presumably be that Irish resident of Spain, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon. Bail in a charge under the Terrorism Act looks rather two-tier. Would a Muslim get that? But the arrest warrant for his contempt of court has also been executed, so he is on remand after all. What Reform UK now had to say about "Tommy Robinson" is the test of whether it chose its existing supporters, whom it would lose by not backing him, or the new ones that it would need in order to make any progress, and whom such support would repel, since anyone else already voted Reform.