Wayback To This Morning

Alex Salmond's unredacted testimony remains here and here.

Someone needs to put it on the record of one or other House of the Parliament of the United Kingdom, under parliamentary privilege.

Regeneration

Boris Johnson had already been born when Harold Wilson became the first ever state educated Prime Minister. We did not last two generations. There will never now be another state educated Prime Minister, but there were only ever six, and three of those, half of the total, never won a General Election. 

The only Prime Minister to have attended a comprehensive school was one of those three, and she was born as long ago as 1956. We are onto our second Prime Minister to have been born in the 1960s, and they both went to the same school. Guess which one. The next Prime Minister may very well have been born in 1980. He was Head Boy of Winchester. While Tony Blair was Prime Minister.

Three of the six, so again half of the total, are dead, and Margaret Thatcher was not one of them. She sometimes made carefully worded statements that allowed the unwary to draw the inference that she had attended a state grammar school. But in the words of Simon Jenkins in his award-festooned Thatcher and Sons, her father, "was ambitious for [his daughters'] advancement, paying for them at the fee-paying Kesteven and Grantham Girls' Grammar School."

If any single party other than the Conservative Party is ever again going to win an overall majority in the House of Commons, then that party has probably not yet been founded. We need to act on the assumption that for the rest of our lives, the Prime Minister would always be the Leader of the Conservative Party, who would always have been privately schooled and who would almost always have been so at a major public school, usually Eton. Don't hate the players.

It will be all very well to try and change this at the ballot box. In between elections, someone will still have to work with the actual Government 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.

To build on Brexit as a double opportunity, both to reorganise the British economy under the direction of a more democratic State, and to develop a fully independent and a peaceable British foreign policy. To exercise the leading role in the pursuit of economic equality of those who suffered most from its absence, namely the working class, and the leading role in the pursuit of international peace of those who suffered most from its absence, namely the working class and the youth, insisting that the working class in Great Britain was indivisible.

To celebrate the fact that Britain was ethnically diverse down to every ward, that Britain was home to people from every inhabited territory, that Britain had a large and growing population of mixed ethnic heritage, and that Britain was therefore the world centre of the liberation struggle of the Global South, accepting no definition of anti-Semitism beyond, "Hostility to or prejudice against Jews." To use that celebration against the central role of the City of London, and of its network of tax havens under British sovereignty, in the oppression of the Global South.

To insist on an approach to climate change which protected and extended secure employment with civilised wages and working conditions, which encouraged economic development around the world, which upheld the right of the working classes and of people of colour to have children, which held down and as far as practicable reduced the fuel prices that always hit the poor hardest, and which refused to restrict travel opportunities or a full diet to the rich.

And to reverse deindustrialisation at home, while bringing an end the harvesting of young men in endless and pointless wars abroad, as two of the many policy implications of the scientific fact of binary and immutable biological sex, implications that also included action on men's health and on fathers' rights.

This list is not exhaustive. I am beavering away on the creation of our think tank, of our Fellowships at one or more sympathetic universities, of our qualification for aspirant parliamentary candidates of any party or none, of our weekly current affairs magazine, of our fortnightly satirical magazine, of our monthly cultural review, of our quarterly academic journal, and of our arrangements to secure representation on public bodies by bypassing the right-wing Labour machine and the metropolitan liberal elite.

Of course, I would vote for candidates whose election would advance our cause, and I would encourage other people to do so. I may even encourage other people to stand. I would particularly like someone who was at least broadly of our mind to take more votes than the margin of victory of the winning candidate here at North West Durham in 2024.

But I myself have been contesting elections throughout my adult lifetime, and with only very limited success. The voters have dismissed my efforts to enter the House of Commons, Durham County Council, the old Derwentside District Council, and at the most recent attempt Lanchester Parish Council. I can now honestly say that no one can come crying to me, because people have had more than ample opportunity to vote for me. It feels good to say that.

There we have it, then. No more elections for me. Ever. As much as anything else, I trust that that will reassure those who did not wish to be seen to be associating with a political opponent by participating in one or more of our think tank, our Fellowships programme, our qualification, our weekly current affairs magazine, our fortnightly satirical magazine, our monthly cultural review, our quarterly academic journal, and our arrangements to secure representation on public bodies by bypassing the weedy brains of the Liberal Establishment and the brainless brawn of the municipal Labour Right.

The Holden-Nut Nuts Challenge: Day 84

Richard Holden, Princess Nut Nuts testified against you at the trial at which you were acquitted, and since your election she has repeatedly blocked your promotion.

So why do you want the country to be run by her? This question will appear here every day until you have answered it. I am the declared and active Independent candidate for North West Durham.

Oliver Kamm Candidacy Watch: Day 89

Oliver Kamm, you consider that Richard Holden, Laura Pidcock and I are all unfit to be Members of Parliament.

In that case, then you need to announce your own parliamentary candidacy here at North West Durham. 

Put up or shut up. This post will appear daily until you do.

The Pidcock-Starmer Challenge: Day 98

Election to the National Executive Committee at Stage One is the stuff of Labour royalty, and 824 of Laura Pidcock's voters expressed no other preference.

Add quite that level of popularity within the party to the fact that she still lives here in North West Durham, and to the fact that she lost this seat by only 1,144 votes.

All in all, she is already the Labour candidate for North West Durham at the General Election of 2024. There is a certain amount of paperwork to be done, but it is nothing more than that.

Any Labour candidate at that Election will either believe that Keir Starmer ought to become Prime Minister, or will at least be pretending to believe that.

Laura is not the pretending type, so the question is this: Laura Pidcock, why do you want Keir Starmer to become Prime Minister?

Not, "Why do you want a Labour Government?" Why do you want Keir Starmer to become Prime Minister?

This question will appear here every day until you have answered it.

I am the declared and active Independent candidate for North West Durham.

Suicide Watch: Day 121

The two of you who are planning to drag me back to court, the Crown has been granted an adjournment because you have no case. And I am still here. What you really want is for me to commit suicide, which strongly suggests that you have been successful in that regard in the past. One of you has already spent nearly 20 years trying to bring about my death by my own hand. Every time that either of you sends the Police round, or what have you, then that is the intention.

But that will never be the effect. You have met your match in me, and you need to remember that while I am not permitted to name you here, you would be named in court if you pursued me there. You would be named in court as having tried to drive a man to suicide. Would that be good for business? Would that be good for political advancement? Would the Church see that as good for the Church? Think on.

This post will appear daily while you continued your doomed campaign to force me to take my own life. Each of you has clearly succeeded in forcing other people to take their own lives. But I say again, to each and both of you, that you have met your match in me. As one of you ought to have worked out a long time ago.

CPS Watch: Day 121

Keir Starmer's Crown Prosecution Service does not deny that it is an enforcement agency of the right-wing Labour machine, and that its behaviour towards me at every point has proved that conclusively, as that behaviour continues to do.

The CPS does not deny that it corrupted the jury at my trial, and that it would do the same to any jury, or to any bench of magistrates, that might try me in future. If I were ever to be convicted of anything again, then that point would be proved.

The Director of Public Prosecutions, Max Hill, does not dispute that he knows me to be innocent of the offences with which he has charged me.

His predecessor, Alison Saunders, does not dispute that she has always known me to have been innocent of the offences with which she charged me and arranged to have me convicted.

Saunders, Hill and the CPS do not dispute that they have persecuted me, and that they continue to do so, purely in order to advance their professional, political and social lives on and around the right wing of the Labour Party.

And Saunders, Hill and the CPS do not dispute that, since I am nothing special, they are certainly doing this to dozens of other people at any given time.

This post will appear daily until there is any change in the above circumstances. I am a declared and active candidate for the parliamentary seat of North West Durham at the next General Election.

My imprisonment prior to the next General Election would make me the First Past the Post, just as my conviction prior to the last one would have saved my deposit. My enemies need to think on.