Trust

"To all those whose parents migrated to obtain a better life for their children. To the economic migrant. The conflict migrant. Those under occupation, dictatorship, persecution, and those experiencing genocide. You matter. Your stories matter more than ever. Your dreams are an act of resistance. To those watching at home, archive your loved ones. Archive your stories yesterday, today, and forever. For Nigeria, for London, the Congo, Sudan. Free Palestine."

Agree or disagree with that, but during a two-hour delay between recording and broadcast, the BBC managed to edit it out. Yet it could not delete one word, the same word that was voluntarily shouted by a convicted paedophile when he lunged at Jennifer Melle, leading to her suspension. While silencing politically black opinion, the BBC reverted to the treatment of the disabled as sideshow freaks. Some of us have long known what everyone now knows to be that Epstein Class.

So light and middle-class that I had grown up thinking that I did not have it, my County Durham accent was mocked at Durham, so heaven knows what Bridget Phillipson had to laugh off at Oxford. But while her claims of childhood deprivation are nowhere near as far-fetched as Wes Streeting's, they do cry out for interrogation. Labour came to power when she was 13. Working for a charity founded by her mother was Phillipson's only job until she entered Parliament at the age of 26. If her council house had no heating upstairs, then why was that matter not addressed by her Labour council? Her mother was on it.

Yet now Phillipson wants all state-funded schools to join trusts. Sometimes, people should be made to have what they had professed to want. In the running of those schools, Phillipson's Liberal Establishment in academia and the media meets her right-wing Labour machine in local government. We ought to be bypassing them both, to secure the representation that had never been afforded by those who had presumed to speak for our people, but never to our people. If that involved doing deals with the Conservatives, then such a deal secured the Leadership of Derby City Council for Chris Williamson. We could not possibly get less out of them than we had ever managed to get out of the Keir Starmers of the world. Sooner the bosses than the scabs.