Dum Spiro Spero

Goodbye and good riddance to Jim DeMint.

Now, how about the Democrat whom Lindsey Grahamnesty defeated in 2008, a Ron Paul activist and a traditional Catholic, with all that each and both entailed, Bob Conley? Yes, a Ron Paul activist and a traditional Catholic won the nomination of the overwhelmingly black Democratic Party in the Palmetto State.

Or, better yet, how about an economically populist and socially conservative Democrat in the vein of Mark Clayton, who would recently have won Tennessee against a Tea Party nominee rather than, as it turned out, a GOP grandee? By now, Conley might already be such a person. Clayton carried both Nashville and Memphis, despite an attempt by the Democratic Party machine to organise a write-in campaign against him.

Homage To Catalonia

The dissolution of Spain would be an unmitigated disaster. But Catalonia is nevertheless a hallowed land, where fell the ILP Contingent's literal martyrs to Stalinism. Is there any memorial to them, whether in Britain or in Catalonia? Or are they like the fallen British servicemen of Mandated Palestine?

There might also have been those, of a Social Catholic persuasion, on the other side. I should be very interested to find out. ILPers and Social Catholics? Hardly mutually exclusive categories, and neither of them either Stalinist or Falangist. One thinks of the War Memorial in Strasbourg, featuring two naked baby boys; no one ever says, but everyone knows, that one of them died in a French uniform, while the other one died in a German uniform. But at least they have a memorial.

Lest we forget, by the time that the Second World War really began in earnest from Britain's point of view, the USSR was both under Stalin and on side, leaving the ILP as the only party to stay out of the Coalition. It attempted to commandeer the entire Opposition benches for its three MPs. But rather more successfully, it continued to ask questions and to contest by-elections. Who will do that next time?

The CPGB has a positively high profile in our historical consciousness compared with that of the ILP. It suits certain interests down to the ground that there be as little discussion as possible of what actually went on in the Spanish Civil War, or of the historical existence of an anti-Stalinist and anti-Trotskyist Left with deep rural roots, whether in Britain or in Catalonia, among other places.

The thing about us London Bureau types and Two-and-a-Halfers is that we take each other as we find each other in order to influence each other as best we can. That meant the ICO in its many manifestations taking the ILP as it found it, complete with temperance Methodists, Social Catholics, Burkean lovers of the organic Constitution and of the organic countryside, the lot. And you could make a very good case that the ICO ended up where Fenner Brockway and the ILP were, not the other way round. The ones who didn't were in Alsace and in the Sudetenland. If you don't know, then you can guess.

Trotsky opposed the merger of his Catalan followers with the BOC, the Workers' and Peasants' Bloc, to form the unfortunately named Partit Obrer d'Unificació Marxista. As things turned out, he was right. Trots never did get anywhere in that, or in the French Workers' and Peasants' Socialist Party of Marceau Pivert, or in the ILP, or in any other part of the family. Almost a forgotten family now. Almost.

Bitter

I, too, would like to come to a purely voluntary arrangement as to how much tax I paid.

Thank you, Starbucks.

Service With Justice

Or, indeed, Quo Fata Vocant.

Ian Lavery, whom I always thought ought to have retained the Presidency of the NUM while sitting as an MP and eventually serving as a Minister, has this day been removed as Parliamentary Private Secretary to Harriet Harman.

His crime of infantile ultra-Leftism? To have tabled amendments enabling Prison Officers to retire at 65, like Police Officers and members of the Fire Brigade.

Within weeks of the next General Election, Harriet Harman will be 65.

Bloomin' Heck

Godfrey Bloom's performance on the Today programme was just breathtaking. Peter Hitchens has a post about how it exposed the amateurish nature of UKIP, and that party's status as nothing more than Thatcherism in exile, with little or no moral, social or cultural conservatism.

However, he is wrong about public spending per se, without which the wider civic life that he favours would be, and increasingly is, impossible, but which properly confers moral responsibilities (enforceable, if necessary) on everyone who benefits from it, which is everyone.

Bloom is a Member of the European Parliament for Yorkshire and the Humber. After this morning, one really does have to wonder quite how much longer he can remain so. If UKIP really is becoming a Northern party, then that will change it, and in ways far from acceptable to its ageing New Right cheerleaders in the London media. Who tend to be rather fond of Godfrey Bloom.

Blue And White, Not Blue And Yellow

Of course an independent Scotland would have to reapply for EU membership.

"Our people are already EU Citizens"? You only get that by holding a qualifying nationality. EU Citizenship has no independent existence. It consists solely in citizenship of a member-state, the definition of which is purely a matter for the member-states separately. Exchange a qualifying for a non-qualifying nationality, exchange British for Scottish Citizenship, and you lose your EU Citizenship, as surely as if you gave up your British passport on acquiring an American one.

"We have MEPs"? And once you had left, then you would no longer have them.

"Our students are away on the ERASMUS scheme"? And once you left, then they no longer would be.

So it goes on.

Who knew, eh?

Fitch Off

The fact that the United Kingdom still has a triple-A credit rating is reason enough in itself to ignore anything these people might have to say. They used to award it to 105 per cent mortgages for people who were practically beggars. In their assessment of Cameron and Osborne, they are still doing much the same thing.

But Cameron and Osborne are fully signed up to flogging off our public assets and services to the other branches of the same New York mob. A policy to which they have been committed throughout their adult lives. At no small monetary gain to themselves.

The markets staged a coup in Britain in May 2010, and they are not about to have their puppet Prime Minister and their puppet Chancellor, "elected" with all of one quarter of the eligible vote, brought down by the facts before they have done what they were installed to do.

What's that? These agencies buy our debt? No one made them do that. They are supposed to be the experts. And it is time for them to admit that they are simply biased in favour of the United States, cheerfully wrecking anywhere else that takes their fancy as surely as certain of their compatriots cheerfully bomb anywhere else that takes their fancy.