The Pits

If there is one thing about which the Blairite Right is completely hysterical, then it is anything to do with the miners. 

That hatred is like nothing else in British politics.

Partly, it is because of the Eurocommunist roots of New Labour, as against the world of Mick McGahey and the Morning Star.

And partly, it is an uncomprehending fury, a furious incomprehension, that some people and some places not only voted Labour before the emergence of Tony Blair, but have continued to do so even after what, until yesterday, we had happily assumed to have been his departure from the scene.

His cultists have, however, been flogging this particular dead horse for a year. Give it up. 

A trade union is perfectly free to do whatever it likes with its money, unless it breaks the law.

A trade union with only 10 members, all of them living in the old mining corner of Northumberland, must be nothing if not accountable internally.

But quite apart from either of those points, why are the Murdoch media going after Ian Lavery, anyway?

Murdoch cannot possibly expect any other party to win the Wansbeck seat in the event of a by-election. Rather, he wants a very right-wing Labour MP there.

What are always his achingly posh London hacks additionally want an MP who is less frightfully working-class, who does not have an Irish surname, and who has not lived his entire life in the North East, which they have never visited, and which they imagine to be near Manchester.

¡No pasarán!

The Brexit Collection

My five star review of Ken Bell: 

Bell makes a powerful case for Brexit as the revenge of a working class that has been marginalised and dispossessed since, not only the Thatcher years, but the turn to monetarism under Callaghan.

He argues for strong immigration controls while the present economic system remains in place, in order to prevent the undercutting of wages and the undermining of workers' hard-won rights.

Now resident in Scotland, he calls for Scottish independence outside the EU, pointing out the absurdity of the SNP's opposition to rule from London but support for rule from Brussels. I do not agree with Scottish independence, but Bell's is the logical articulation of that position.

 "The Durham Miners would never wear it," were the words that the British Government of the late 1940s wrote across the plans for the EU's first precursor, before duly sending them back.

That was that. "The Durham Miners would never wear it." So the United Kingdom's answer was no.

That meant the Durham Miners' Association, with its vast network of national and international contacts. But it also meant the miners themselves, who were the basis of that Association's wealth and power.

Yet on the day of the EU referendum, Thursday 23rd June 2016, we learned that in 2015, for the first time on record, more people had died in the North East of England, from which I write, than had been born here.

County Durham voted Leave, and Sunderland, which had been part of the Durham coalfield in the 1940s, shook the international money markets by doing so.

Albeit from a perspective partly in the North West and partly in Scotland, Bell explains why.

Faux Manchu

They said that Obama, too, was a Manchurian Candidate.

And I do mean "they".

Like the birtherism to which it was closely connected, the theory, although enthusiastically taken up by Republicans, originated with the Clintons and their ghastly mob.

They, meanwhile, remained and remain a wholly owned subsidiary of Saudi Arabia.

Four Into Two

Watch out for all four living former Prime Ministers, two of each party, to call for a second referendum on the United Kingdom's membership of the European Union.

But they will not be able to include the three living former Deputy Prime Ministers, who are from three different parties, because one of those accepts the result of the referendum that we have already had.

Which one? The Labour one. Of course.

Things Fall Apart?

Not least because there has never been a critical biography of him, there are all sorts of unappreciated things about Tony Blair. 

One is that he is a dedicated Francophile. 

Today, he probably sees himself as de Gaulle. But he far more closely resembles Giscard d'Estaing at Verdun-sur-le-Doubs in 1978.

Giscard identified four elements to the French political opinion of the day: Gaullists, Communists, supporters of Mitterrand's Socialist Party, and those whom he himself had decided to organise into the UDF, which was modestly to be named after his own most recent book.

Blair's vision is not dissimilar.

And Giscard's pro-European and pro-American Presidency of economic and social liberalisation may be seen as the original definition of "the centre" in those arbitrary terms.

Blair's latest initiative may well be those terms' last stand.

And his. Although we have thought that before.

National Health

Paul Nuttall did used to want to privatise the NHS. In his heart of hearts, he probably still does.

Yet today, he called for massively increased spending on it and on the intimately connected social care system.

In Britain, you can lead a major political party and want to abolish the monarchy.

That is probably or certainly the position of the Leaders of two of the three largest parties in the House of Commons.

But you cannot lead even a minor political party and question the State's direct ownership of hospitals staffed by its direct employees.

Those employees provide their services free of charge at the point of need, and they have been trained entirely by the State.

This entire arrangement is altogether beyond question.

Most people would tell you that that simply was Britain; that it was not very far from being the whole point of this country.

If you doubt that, then consider that the Leader of the most right-wing party in Great Britain has had to pay extravagant homage to it today in order to salvage so much as a respectable second place at a forthcoming by-election.

And consider that no party in Northern Ireland would ever dream of questioning it in the slightest.

The DUP might like to pretend that fundamentalist Protestantism was the glue of the Union, and the United Kingdom's defining difference from the Irish Republic.

But it knows perfectly well what really is. And so does everyone else.

Blexit

Labour cannot even be bothered to issue a statement in response to Tony Blair, which is quite extraordinary, when you think about it. 

As is the castigation of him for the Iraq War by Boris Johnson, who voted in favour of it. 

And the Lib Dems say that people who agree with Blair should join them. 

Yet they were no friends of his when he was Prime Minister, and their current Leader's views on everything else do not chime with his in the least.