Yeo, Johnson

As George W Bush might have put it.

I hope that Boris Johnson succumbs to the pressure to take an IQ test, and that he turns out to have a very high IQ. Then people might see what a load of hokum it is. They must already see that this supposedly amiable buffoon is in fact only one of those things. As some of us have been saying for years.

But, although at least one of them has since left over Syria, several prominent Labour commentators were inexplicably permitted to retain their party cards even after they had endorsed Johnson's bid for re-election. What says the National Executive Committee about that now?

Speaking of that august body, the Conservatives have no equivalent of it to grant or refuse endorsement of a local party's choice of parliamentary candidate. These days, it is impossible to imagine the NEC's approving the deselection of a sitting MP against his or her will.

But if Tim Yeo really were to be deselected, then all that his party could do would be to refuse to extend the Whip to his Tea Party replacement. That, therefore, would be what it would do: it would make absolutely clear that, even if elected, such a person would never receive the Conservative Whip.

And that, should he get in as an Independent, Yeo would receive the Whip if he asked for it, which he would. Not one penny piece would the national party spend on seeking to elect his opponent, and it would direct donors to his campaign fund instead. The same would apply to the others on any right-wing hit list, which obviously exists.

Far North Briton

Not only was Alistair Carmichael the most audibly Eurosceptical member of the Coalition ever to have appeared on Question Time, but he was also the most uncompromising Scottish Unionist to have done so on behalf of any party since 1997.

While Scotland remained in the United Kingdom, he baldly stated, a mandate to govern the United Kingdom, namely an overall majority in the House of Commons, was and in and of itself a mandate to govern Scotland.

Is that the Liberal view from Orkney and Shetland these days? Quite conceivably, it is. Indeed, quite demonstrably, it is.

Maximum Insecurity

Some of us have known for a while that Charles Taylor was being held at HMP Frankland, as revealed on the front page of the Northern Echo tomorrow.

Ad hoc tribunals to try specific individuals are inherently illegal. Amnesty International rightly made that point, and did so very powerfully, in its 2003 report into the trial of the Grenada 17.

Yet in 2007 that same organisation welcomed the trial of Charles Taylor before just such a tribunal, and called for its proceedings to be broadcast in Liberia for “educative” effect. 

The International Criminal Court has never publicly indicted anyone who was not an African.

Be he innocent or be he guilty, Taylor was tried, if it can be so described, and he was convicted and sentenced, by an unlawful body: a specially constituted branch of the Special Court for Sierra Leone, itself a creature, not of international treaty-making and ratification, but of executive fiat on the part of the United Nations.

Laurent Gbagbo is also now subject to such an unlawful travesty of a trial, as was Thomas Lubanga.

Sixty Years On

Let it sink in. On every occasion since 1955, when the Conservative Party (with or without Scottish Unionists, Ulster Unionists, Liberal Unionists and National Liberals) has won a General Election, then it has done so with a lower percentage of the vote than on the occasion before.

Was this caused by comprehensive schools in 1955 or in 1959? Was this caused by a Leftist BBC in 1955 or in 1959? Was this caused by postal votes from Pakistan in 1955 or in 1959?

The next General Election will be held 60 years after that of 1955. Sixty years. Three generations.

Anyone who was 21 on that day will be 81, having lived an entire voting life in which the main thing going on was the slow but inexorable decline of the Conservative vote.

Anyone born on the last day that that party won an overall majority, in 1992, already had the vote at the most recent General Election.

Anyone born on 3rd May 1997, the first full day of Tony Blair as Prime Minister, will have the vote on 7th May 2015, having never lived a single second under a Conservative majority government.

Britain has been going off the Conservatives since before almost all New Commonwealth immigration, and since before there even was a New Commonwealth, really.

Britain has been going off the Conservatives since before the 1960s Counterculture, and since well before it affected very many people.

Britain has been going off the Conservatives since long before Thatcherism.

Britain has been going off the Conservatives since a good decade before David Cameron, never mind George Osborne, was born.

That process is now almost complete.

Becoming Mexico

Neil Clark writes:

Well, at least we beat Mexico. The new OECD report on pensions reveals that for people on average earnings, Britain's state pension is the least generous of all the 34 OECD members bar one.

The average Briton's state pension replaces 32.6% of their income when they retire. Our state pension isn't just stingy compared with other prosperous western European countries. The governments of Hungary, Slovakia, Slovenia all give their pensioners more, as does Turkey.

What an indictment of neoliberal Britain. We have the lowest state pension of any major country in Europe and also the highest rail fares. The country that comes top, or near the top, in tables where it's better to come bottom, we also come bottom, or near the bottom, in tables where it's better to come top. Inequality? We're right there at the top.

Another report by the OECD, published in December 2011, said that income inequality among working age people had risen faster in the UK than in any other OECD country since 1975. Social mobility? We're right at the bottom: OECD figures in 2012 showed earnings in the UK were more likely to reflect our parents' earnings than any other country.

It doesn't have to be like this and wouldn't be if it weren't for the radical changes made to our economy from May 1979 onwards.

The decline of the state pension began in 1980 when Margaret Thatcher's government severed the link between the state pension and average earnings, introduced by Labour's Barbara Castle in 1974. Thatcher's dream was to wean people off the state and onto private provision in the same way she wanted to wean people off council houses.

Although an earnings link has been restored by the coalition, the damage has already been done by successive governments since Thatcher. The new flat-rate pension of £144 a week planned for 2016 will still be below what it would have been in 2008 had the earnings-link been maintained.

Our high rail fares, like our low pensions, are also the direct consequence of neoliberalism. A recent TUC-commissioned report found that prices on Britain's privatised railways for long distance, day return and season tickets, were around twice as much as the average fares in France, Germany, Italy and Spain.

"In France, a near fully publicly owned rail system manages to give its passengers fares, which are far lower than the UK, for almost exactly the same amount of public rail subsidy between 1996 and 2010", the report declared.

With its pitiful state pension, Britain is not only no country for old men or women, but it's certainly no country for old men and women who like to travel by train.

It's revealing to compare the situation now with 1978, the last year before our economic model was changed. In 1975 the "old" Labour government introduced Serps (state earnings related scheme), a generous scheme to top up the basic state pension.

On returning to power in 1974 Labour also raised widows' and retirement pensions by a record real increase of 13%. This move meant that pensions as a proportion of average earnings matched their previous record, set in 1965 – also under a Labour government.

In 1978, pensioners were not only getting an excellent deal from the government, with the value of the state pension rising to 20.4% of average earnings, it was also the year that the gap between the rich and poor reached its lowest level in our history. Never before had the share of income of the bottom 90% been so great and the share of the top 10% been so low.

Public ownership of transport and utilities meant lower prices for customers: in the days when the publicly owned British Rail ran the trains, you didn't need to book months in advance to get an affordable fare.

I don't know about you, but I'd rather live in a country with the highest state pensions and the lowest rail fares. To achieve that mere tinkering of the present system won't do: the left in Britain needs its own Margaret Thatcher, as determined to rebuild the progressive postwar mixed economy model as Thatcher was to destroy it.

Half measures won't get us anywhere: neoliberalism is deliberately designed to increase inequalities, destroy state provision and allow corporations to charge us much more for things than when they were in public ownership, like our utilities and our railways.

Coincidentally, BBC2 has been showing repeats of the 1978 series of the classic sitcom Are You Being Served?. The staff of Grace Brothers department store sometimes grumble at the wages that young Mr Grace pays them, but if they knew what was going to happen in the UK in the years ahead – the abolition of wages councils, the decline of the state pension, the growth of zero-hours contracts and McJobs – they'd probably have been much happier with their conditions.

The sad fact is that for the vast majority of Britons things have never been quite so good as they were in the year before neoliberalism hit. We could have been another Norway. Instead, we're becoming Mexico.

Hexham Courant

My old mate Liam Carr has been selected as the Labour candidate for Hexham. The seat has never returned a Labour MP, and the party came third last time, with only 19 per cent of the vote. But Liam is a fighter, and the Coalition has changed the weather. If you were ever minded to do so, then why vote Liberal Democrat now?

For that matter, why vote Conservative? Catastrophic cuts in rural jobs, incomes and services? Cruel cuts in our conventional defence? Impending ruinous cuts in provincial disposable incomes by the abolition of National Pay Agreements? Vote Conservative for any or all of those?

The further deregulation of Sunday trading? The replacement of Her Majesty’s Constabulary with the British KGB that is the National Crime Agency? The devastation of rural communities by the allowing of foreign companies and even foreign states to buy up our postal service and our roads? Vote Conservative for any or all of those?

Royal Mail privatisation, which has robbed the taxpayer blind while severing the monarchy’s direct link to every address in this Kingdom? The return of the East Coast Main Line, the only publicly owned railway in Great Britain and the one requiring the least subsidy from the taxpayer, to the private sector from which it has already had to be rescued twice? Vote Conservative for either or both of those?

There was no recession in this country on the day of the last General Election. Every time that there is mention of a recovery, remember that Labour left a situation from which there was no need to recover.

In the three years since, we have never approached the level of growth that was bequeathed by Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling. But we have borrowed more than in the preceding 13 years.

This is hardly surprising, considering that the last Conservative Government repeatedly took the United Kingdom into recession, and that it quadrupled the National Debt.

Labour is, so to speak, making the weather on energy prices, with David Cameron humiliatingly exposed as a pitiful fraud who pretended to be opposed to a freeze even while secretly begging the Big Six to implement one until the General Election.

70 per cent favours renationalisation, the inexorable logic of the position that Labour has successfully compelled both parties to adopt. 75 per cent favours renationalising the railways, which over the course of a Parliament could be done for free.

Labour supported a massive expansion of nuclear power when David Cameron was calling it “a last resort”, and Labour is once again emphatically committed to the exploitation of our vast reserves of coal. Such are the fruits of the trade union link.

Labour forced George Osborne to U-turn completely on the allegedly impossible cap on the rates of interest on payday loans.

Every single Labour MP voted against military intervention in Syria, setting off the chain of events that has led to the settlement with Iran, a breathtaking achievement for an Opposition party.

Labour wants to outlaw employment discrimination against military reservists, whereas the votes of the Conservatives have already kept such discrimination lawful.

Labour is campaigning to retain the cap on Romanian and Bulgarian immigration that it successfully negotiated but which the present Government is too incompetent, and too in thrall to big business rather than having links to the trade unions, to protect.

Never mind some referendum at the end of time: every single Labour MP voted to demand a real-terms reduction in the British contribution to the EU Budget, right here and right now. The number of Conservatives who voted with Labour was lower than the number of Liberal Democrats in the House of Commons. David Cameron has wholly failed to deliver that reduction.

Labour is the force for the Union against separatism on at least three fronts. Moreover, the vast area of England where Labour now massively predominates would secede from any Thatcherite rump state. However, the whole of England has been removed from the United Kingdom without our consent by the dismantlement of our National Health Service.

That defining aspect of British identity still exists everywhere else. In the commercial interests of its Chairman, the BBC is blacking out this scandal. Only Labour supports England’s NHS, and thus England’s British identity as everyone beyond a barely British Loony Right understands the term.

Labour’s poll lead is always large enough to deliver a comfortable majority even if the boundaries were as the Conservative Party would arbitrarily wish them to be, which in any case they are not and are not going to be.

Liam would make an excellent MP. Even granted that local Labour Parties in Tory areas are well to the left of those in Labour ones, it is notable that he, firmly of the Labour Left, has been selected as an example of his generation and mine, currently in our middle thirties.

As set out above, that makes him a natural candidate both of the mainstream of the Labour Party, and of the mainstream of Britain. Including the mainstream of Tory England. For example, Hexham.

World AIDS Day

The position of the Catholic Church is fully borne out by the facts, and is unique in being so.

Certain people might consider applying some journalistic or scientific objectivity to the question of where in Africa the condom use relentlessly promoted by Western nongovernmental organisations and compliant governments has ever arrested, never mind reversed, the rate of HIV infection. There is nowhere.

However, such a reversal is under way in Uganda, where the government's message is the same as the Catholic Church’s: “Change Your Behaviour”. Huge numbers of condoms have been distributed in Botswana, and the result has been for President Festus Mogae to declare, “Abstain or die”.

Who, exactly, is incapable of fidelity within a monogamous marriage and abstinence outside such a marriage? Women? Black people? Poor people? Developing-world people? Or just poor black women in the developing world?

There are the closest ties between my native Saint Helena and Cape Town, the gateway to and from AIDS-ravaged South Africa. Sailors, young single people, all the stereotypes. Yet Saint Helena (where, by the way, there are almost no Catholics, but very strong traditional family structures and so on) is one of extremely few territories in the world never to have had a case of HIV infection. Not one. Ever. So yes, it can be done. It is being done.

There is probably no greater force on earth for spreading HIV infection than the condomaniacal Department for International Development, for all the other good that DfID does. But change is coming. The Shadow Secretary of State is a highly committed Catholic, and one his Ministers is going to be the only Pentecostal pastor in Parliament.

Jim Murphy might not last long, due to his somewhat uncompromising Blairism. At which point, bring up the Blue Labour-connected, Ed Milband-nominating Gavin Shuker.