The Radical Centre?

What chance would Andy Burnham stand of winning a General Election if he had needed the Greens to stand aside for him at a by-election, or at least to have behaved as if they had done so? Likewise, if Caroline Lucas thinks that only Burnham can beat Reform UK, then why is she still in the Green Party? That is as much a question for it as it is for her. But Burnham, like Keir Starmer or Wes Streeting, has no intention of removing from the Labour Party the only British member of Donald Trump’s so-called Board of Peace.

To end the war in which Tony Blair did not want Britain to pretend to be less than fully involved, not that that pretence has ever convinced the Iranians or their allies for one moment, the proposed deal includes a $300 billion “international investment fund” for Iran. Yes, the Iranian regime is appalling. The Ukrainian regime has just reburied with full state honours the Nazi collaborators Andriy Melnyk and Sofia Fedak-Melnyk, and the former President Volodymyr Zelensky, whose constitutional term of office has long since expired, has purportedly conferred the title “Heroes of the UPA” on the Independent Special Operations Centre (North) of the Special Operations Forces. Israel and Poland are in understandable uproar. But just as big, bad Russia can take only a small of corner of Ukraine, so big, bad America has so completely failed to take Iran that it is going to have pay what were effectively reparations and richly deserved as such. Still, there will be contracts in it. Trump and Blair themselves will not be out of pocket.

Blair may also be having some luck in domestic policy, as the Government has announced, “300,000 new training and work experience placements across construction, social care and hospitality to tackle youth unemployment.” Hospitality? In the present climate? But anyway, with no promise of a job at the end of it, this is a Blairite revival of Margaret Thatcher’s old Youth Training Scheme, giving a year of two of free labour to private companies that clearly had the work to do, but which did not feel like recruiting at the rate for the job, not even now that that rate would be only the reduced minimum wage for those deemed too young to deserve the full one for the same work. The 2024 Labour manifesto promised to end that iniquity, but instead the State is to pay that rate so that politicians’ corporate donors and rather more generous future employers did not have to.

It is not worth considering the possibility that the Tony Blair Institute would have no lucrative role in this. But the former Prime Minister with seven living successors does not speak for the centre, radical or otherwise. That is we who seek 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. In the struggle for economic equality, the leading role belongs to those who suffer most from its absence, namely the working class, while in the struggle for international peace, the leading role belongs to those who suffer most from its absence, namely the working class and the youth.

Social solidarity is an expression of personal responsibility, personal responsibility is protected by social solidarity, international solidarity is an expression of national sovereignty, and national sovereignty is protected by international solidarity. Equality and diversity must include economic equality and class diversity, regional equality and regional diversity, the equal sovereignty of diverse states, and equal respect for diverse opinions within a framework of free speech and other civil liberties, including due process of law with the presumption of innocence, requiring that conviction be beyond reasonable doubt.

All of this is opposed by and to the European Union, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, the World Trade Organisation, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the anti-industrial Malthusianism and misanthropy of the Green agenda, the treatment of identity politics as equal or superior to class politics, the treatment of gender identity as equal or superior to sex (“biological sex”), the cancel culture of which our people have always been the principal victims, the erosion of civil liberties, the stupefaction of the workers or the youth, the indulgence of separatist tendencies in any of the three parts of Great Britain, the consideration of any all-Ireland settlement that failed to preserve the NHS and other such achievements, or the failure to recognise that a sovereign state with its own free-floating, fiat currency had as much of that currency as it chose to issue to itself, with readily available fiscal and monetary means of controlling any inflationary effect, means that therefore needed to be under democratic political control.