Main Line

As with the enactment of Leveson and the use of the Statute Law to separate investment banking from retail banking, only one thing can keep rail renationalisation out of the Labour Manifesto in 2015, when Labour is going to win by a country mile.

That something is, in all three cases, that the present Government had already done it, just as it has alraedy agreed not to increase the fuel duty.

As for Leveson, note that the public school attitude to inconvenient women is alive and well. The horse is off to the knacker's yard.

Flagged Up

Flying the Red, White and Blue from a civic building every day of the year seems like an American thing to do. Or a Colonial one, indicative of some sort of insecurity. Not quite in place on the soil of the very United Kingdom herself, at least not in a civilian context.

Why, then, would the Unionist councillors or the Loyalist activists of Belfast want to do it? What makes them so insecure, especially now that most of their Catholic neighbours support the Union in principle?

But a Blue Ensign emblazoned with a shield bearing three lions and surmounted by Saint Edward's Crown, being the Crown also used in Canada, Australia and New Zealand: that would be a flag for England which did not make everywhere that flew it look like an emergency medical facility.

Suitably crowned shields would bear a lion rampant, a dragon and a harp as the respective flags of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, all following a classic Commonwealth pattern. In each case, there would also be room for a motto: Honi Soit Qui Mal Y Pense, Nemo Me Impune Lacessit, Cymru am Byth, Quis Separabit.

Not least, though not exclusively, because of the effect that it would have on arresting any slide towards the dissolution of the Union, the MPs for, and the municipal leaders of, the 12 ceremonial counties of Cheshire, Cumbria, Durham, the East Riding of Yorkshire, Greater Manchester, Lancashire, Merseyside, North Yorkshire, Northumberland, South Yorkshire, Tyne and Wear, and West Yorkshire need to issue a Declaration that, in the event of the secession of either or both of Scotland and Wales, each of those ceremonial counties, or perhaps those existing on their territory in 1970, would become a State of the Union of the North of England.

Just so long as the identity of the Head both of the Union and of each of the States, as is the arrangement in Australia and in relation to Canada and her several Provinces, were made abundantly clear by the fact that, in best Commonwealth fashion, the flags of the Union and of each of the States were in all 13, or however many, cases variations on the Blue Ensign, each with an appropriate heraldic shield and motto emblazoned on it, surmounted by Saint Edward's Crown.

Nothing could better befit the last outposts of the Britain and of the England in which most British and most English people grew up.

Don't Be Fueled

A new word, not a typo.

The real economic story today is that borrowing is up far beyond the projections of Gordon Brown, Ed Miliband and Ed Balls. We are up to eight years, and counting, when it comes to doing anything at all about this.

There was no recession on the day of the 2010 General Election. It was over. That is a fact. Yet look at this country now.

Beyond Bear-Baiting

The aged Cold War Trotskyists on The Guardian and elsewhere are continuing the work of Denis MacShane against Conservative Friends of Russia, the treatment of which within its own party illustrates the almost complete disappearance of any conservative or Tory sensibility as surely as does the support for the global money markets, for Rupert Murdoch, for the neoconservative war agenda from Bosnia and Kosovo to Syria and Iran via Afghanistan and Iraq, and for the destruction of the most ancient Christian communities in the world and of a civilisation as old as England by extremely recent immigrants who venerate exceptionally vicious anti-British terrorists active within living memory.

My friend Carl Thomson and others need to move beyond such a petty party, even if they, personally, might retain membership of it. They must reach out to everyone who celebrates the fact that Russia is now emerging from the gangster capitalism that has followed Communism, and she once again recognises herself as pre-eminent among the Slavs in their mission as the age-old gatekeepers of our Biblical-Classical civilisation, whether against Islam, against Far Eastern domination, or now also against the godless, rootless, stupefied, promiscuous, usury-based, metrosexual, war-hungry pseudo-West that holds up Israel, Georgia and Taiwan as supposedly plucky and inspiring outposts.

Attempts to drag Russia into the pseudo-West were not only always doomed, although guaranteed to cause immense pain in being proved so, but they also failed to take account of the seeds of hope even within the Soviet system as such, notably the strong patriotism, and the very traditional system of education, in which teachers who were universally assumed to know more than their pupils stood in front of orderly rows of uniformed young charges and simply imparted their knowledge, with the result that, once the veneer of Marxist vocabulary was stripped away, that system’s products were often significantly better-educated than many of their Western contemporaries.

A strong patriotism, a very traditional system of education, and in consequence a far better-educated and more cultured population, with access to even very high cultural life guaranteed by the State: again, these are potentially cross-party causes in which those of a conservative and Tory sensibility ought to be in the vanguard. But are there any of that sensibility left?

"Labour for Democracy", Indeed

Labour is reverting to its historical norm as the voice and vehicle of a many-rooted social democratic patriotism in all directions, inclusive of social and cultural conservatives as well as social and cultural liberals, inclusive of rural as well as urban and suburban voices, inclusive of provincial as well as metropolitan contributions, and inclusive of religious as well as secular insights. The 2010 intake is very largely “classic Labour”, the boys in their dads’ suits having decided to sit out the hard work of Opposition. As a result, Labour has long enjoyed a commanding lead both in the opinion polls and at the actual polls.

But Labour came third or below in 211 constituencies in 2010, mostly places where it always does, and in most of those pretty distantly. However, the Coalition has changed the weather. The SNP will also be finished for at least a generation after the loss of the independence referendum in 2014. Imagine a formation which, while welcoming Labour’s present return to the historical norm set out above, was for that very reason fully aware that someone needed to keep Labour on that track or else stand ready to replace it.

Properly organised and sufficiently funded, such a formation could expect to win in 2015 about one third of those seats, i.e., around 70. That would be enough to make a very significant difference indeed, even to hold the balance of power in a hung Parliament. But it could only happen if the unions, most obviously, stumped up the cash. And it could only happen if Labour, with no realistic hope of winning those seats, stood aside in that formation’s favour.

That formation could and should also fill a very British gap, the lack of a party anchoring the Left while engaging fully in the battle of ideas at every level of cultural life and of the education system, while refusing to consign or to confine demotic culture to “the enormous condescension of posterity”, and while co-ordinating broad-based and inclusive campaigns for human rights and civil liberties, for peace (including nuclear, radiological, chemical and biological disarmament, and including against the arms trade), for environmental responsibility, and for the defence and extension of jobs, services and amenities.

Let’s get on with it.

The Medium Is The Message

The difficulty of doing something somewhere else is not an argument against doing it where one can.

In any case, the print media are alive and well, and may they ever remain so. Anti-blogging hacks and anti-newspaper bloggers should both shut up, because neither of them has anything interesting to say. The Internet joins print, the radio that was supposed to kill off print, and the television that was supposed to kill off radio. Let a thousand flowers bloom.

Or 53 flowers, anyway. That is the number of print newspapers and magazines listed as members of the Parliamentary Press Gallery, which is one of several existing forms of State licensing. How many of those 53 were invited to this sit-down? How many of the newspapers registered as such with the Post Office were invited?

Looking Out For A Northern Light

Look out for the European Elections in June 2014.

As ever, the Conservatives are going to come third in Scotland. They are going to drop from first to second in Wales, but second is still a respectable showing under proportional representation.

However, they are going to come fifth or below in each of the three Northern regions, as well as probably in each of the two Midland ones. As for the Lib Dems, merely to mention them indicates their looming fate.

Here in the North East, with three seats to fill and currently with one MEP from each of the Big Three parties, UKIP will take the Conservative seat. But who will take the Lib Dem one? Labour, which used to have two seats here? If not, then who, and why?