Going Viral Means Not Going Anywhere

The librarian pretty much ordered me out, and she was right.

Coughing, sore throat, chest pains, splitting headache, burning eyes, and a soaring temperature, all in a man whom an old operation had left with a weakened immune system, and who had spent a week in a courthouse, in public eateries, in public libraries, and on public transport.

Lemsip in hand, I am not expecting to be out for a week.

"In Other News"

That was how the Today programme really did preface its brief mentions of the latest American bombings in Iraq, and of the release of Chelsea Manning. There was no discussion of either. But the threat of war with Iran remains very real indeed. And a crowdfunding page to help to pay Manning's court fees is here.

I long ago named a dauphin or delfino who was 20 years my junior, who signed my nomination papers last year, who attended the count, and who even drove me home from it. He would have my full support if I were unable to contest North West Durham in December 2024, which is more than long enough into the future for plenty of water to have passed under Westminster Bridge by then.

But other than that, and assuming that the Government's programme had begun to deliver the goods along the old Red Wall in defiance of Labour's whinging expressions of all that was petty in the petty bourgeoisie, then I see no reason why I ought not to support Richard Holden. Indeed, I might very well be proud to do so.

In the meantime, ours is the 2020 Vision of a new political party, a new think tank, a new weekly newspaper, a new monthly cultural review, a new quarterly academic journal, and so much else besides. I will be standing for Parliament again here at North West Durham next time if possible, so please give generously. In any event, please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

The End of An Era

It was, in fact, a monetarist approach of the sort which Keith Joseph and I believed in and it outflanked from the right those members of my own Shadow Cabinet who were still clinging to the nostrums of Keynesian demand management... [This was] the turning point.

So, in her memoirs, wrote Margaret Thatcher of Jim Callaghan's and Denis Healey's Budget in 1976, which, "announced deep cuts in public spending and borrowing, and targets for the money supply." That was the start of the era that ended with Boris Johnson's and Rishi Sunak's Budget this week.

But there are still those who cleave to the old order. To the delight of most of its MPs, the Labour Party will soon be led by Keir Starmer, and here at North West Durham it will field in 2024, either the former MP who lost it the seat, or the next clone off the production line of the North East's increasingly malfunctioning right-wing Labour machine. Neither of those could beat Richard Holden. Nor would either of them deserve to do so.

I long ago named a dauphin or delfino who was 20 years my junior, who signed my nomination papers last year, who attended the count, and who even drove me home from it. He would have my full support if I were unable to contest this seat in December 2024, which is more than long enough into the future for plenty of water to have passed under Westminster Bridge by then.

But other than that, and assuming that the Government's programme had begun to deliver the goods along the old Red Wall in defiance of Labour's whinging expressions of all that was petty in the petty bourgeoisie, then I see no reason why I ought not to support Richard. Indeed, I might very well be proud to do so.

In the meantime, ours is the 2020 Vision of a new political party, a new think tank, a new weekly newspaper, a new monthly cultural review, a new quarterly academic journal, and so much else besides. I will be standing for Parliament again here at North West Durham next time if possible, so please give generously. In any event, please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

Of Interest

No Conservative Government ever surrendered democratic political control of monetary policy, and at seven o'clock this morning a Conservative Government appeared to reassert it.

Jolly good, but the Conservatives do need to be kept on their toes. Ours is the 2020 Vision of a new political party, a new think tank, a new weekly newspaper, a new monthly cultural review, a new quarterly academic journal, and so much else besides.

I will be standing for Parliament again here at North West Durham next time, so please give generously. In any event, please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

"Politically, This Is Bold, It Is Audacious"

So says Laura Kuenssberg. It was called something else when Labour proposed it. And that was by Labour MPs.

But they will be led by Keir Starmer soon enough, and he can lead them in agreeing with Sajid Javid that a £30 billion stimulus package is an appalling idea.

Up here along the old Red Wall, however, we might think rather better of it. And this is where General Elections are won and lost. Although the Conservatives do have to face the competition in which they profess to believe.

Ours is the 2020 Vision of a new political party, a new think tank, a new weekly newspaper, a new monthly cultural review, a new quarterly academic journal, and so much else besides.

I will be standing for Parliament again here at North West Durham next time, so please give generously. In any event, please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

Trevor Who?

As he endorsed the sprightly 78-year-old Bernie Sanders, the ailing 78-year-old Jesse Jackson failed to notice that much of the upscale, white, Millennial crowd had no idea who he was. 

He waxed lyrical about battles and martyrdoms from before many of their parents were born. He tried to lead them in the old call-and-response, which left them utterly bewildered. He talked about all being precious in the sight of God, and you cut have cut the embarrassment with a knife.

The Civil Rights industrial complex has been more or less irrelevant for 12 years, since Barack Obama managed to be nominated and elected almost without it. In the same way, it is no disrespect to Doreen Lawrence to say that her 67-year-old Jamaican accent is not, in 2020, the voice of BAME Britain, or even of BAME London.

Keir Starmer may indeed enjoy the support of the old Afro-Caribbean and South Asian Establishment within the right-wing Labour machine in London, Greater Manchester, West Yorkshire, and the former Metropolitan County of the West Midlands, plus pockets in other urban areas.

But there is now someone in Britain from every inhabited territory on the planet. There are no all-white towns, and there are ever-fewer all-white villages. The BAME population is young, and increasingly mixed-race. Its members were typically born here, as were their parents. And Starmer used to be the Director of Public Prosecutions.

All in all, then, Trevor who? Anyone else would have been, not suspended from the Labour Party, but expelled from it, for telling people not to vote Labour at the last General Election. Trevor Phillips has got off very, very lightly. The old Afro-Caribbean and South Asian Establishment within the right-wing Labour machine in London, indeed.

Ours is the 2020 Vision of a new political party, a new think tank, a new weekly newspaper, a new monthly cultural review, a new quarterly academic journal, and so much else besides. I will be standing for Parliament again here at North West Durham next time, so please give generously. In any event, please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

The Lanchester Review: Give Labour Its Pearl Harbor Moment

My latest:

As Keir Starmer prepares to begin his Leadership of the Labour Party with enormous local election losses, so much for him. The Left’s answer to “You’re unelectable” will be, “Well, so are you.”

If Boris Johnson wanted to give Labour a proper Pearl Harbor moment, then he would announce that at the Conservative Party’s top 100 target seats, plus wherever a Conservative MP was standing down, the candidate would meet all of four criteria: he or she would have lived in the constituency for at least 15 years, would be living in rented accommodation, would hold no university degree or equivalent qualification, and would have an annual income not higher than £12,500. Before anyone starts, that last is two in five adults.

The Prime Minister should make it clear that while this was a complete one-off, there would be no exception to any of those four requirements this time, in order to change Parliament for a generation by ensuring an intake of at least 50 such MPs in 2024. As much as anything else, that income requirement would ensure that there were no shortage of women, ethnic minorities, and the disabled; I am both mixed-race and disabled, and I know. Anyone would think that it were really all about class. Some people might whinge that he had not gone through this committee, that committee and the other committee, but once he had made the announcement, then it would be too late. Tony Blair used to pull that trick all the time, because it works.

Where there were two or more such applicants, then the local association’s shortlist of two would go out to a binding, independently administered ballot of all registered parliamentary electors in that constituency. Johnson should then challenge Labour to match all of this for its own top 100 target seats, plus wherever a Labour MP was standing down. Labour could not begin to meet that challenge. Its reaction would be hysterical in both senses of the word.

At the same time, Johnson should announce that, unless they had said no within six hours of the announcement, then certain people would now be Visiting Fellows of the Downing Street Policy Unit, to publish through it with the approval both of its Director and of Dominic Cummings, not as an expression of government policy, but because what they were saying made a useful contribution to the debate. Each would receive an annual honorarium of £12,000, while remaining perfectly free to publish elsewhere in other capacities.

That would give a voice to the rural working class, and to the industrial and former industrial communities that were either outside the metropolitan areas or peripheral to them. A voice to those who were committed to upholding family and community values by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty. A voice to those who cherished free speech and other civil liberties, including due process of law. A voice to those who sought a fully independent British foreign policy, with a critical and sceptical approach to intelligence and security agencies.

A voice to those who found that the definition of anti-Semitism in the Oxford English Dictionary was perfectly sufficient: “Hostility to or prejudice against Jews.” A voice to those who did not feel represented by the usual Jewish, Afro-Caribbean or South Asian “community leaders” embedded in the right-wing Labour Establishment. A voice to those of mixed heritage, and to those whose migrant backgrounds lay beyond the Caribbean and South Asia.

A voice to those who acknowledged the scientific fact of binary and immutable biological sex. And a voice to those who celebrated the full compatibility between the highest view of human demographic, economic, intellectual and cultural expansion and development, and the most active concern for the conservation of the natural world and of the treasures bequeathed by such expansion and development in the past.

I have 30 names in front of me as I write. All are reasonably well-known to those who pay attention. Again, this would challenge the Labour Party to name each of them to a comparable position as well. And again, Labour would fail that test.

Ours is the 2020 Vision of a new political party, a new think tank, a new weekly newspaper, a new monthly cultural review, a new quarterly academic journal, and so much else besides. I will be standing for Parliament again here at North West Durham next time, so please give generously. In any event, please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.