The future is Local

You'd be hard put to invent anything as singularly stupid as Corbyn's spiteful and vindictive scorched earth policy as his grip is forced from the Labour Party. He, Milne and McDonnell have spent their term getting as many as possible of their own people into Labour's key positions, and no doubt a new leader will find employment contracts impossible or hugely expensive to break. However, the absolute moronic icing on the stupidity cake is the suspension of Trevor Phillips on the grounds of preventing reputational damage to the party.

The May elections will be a test of how far Corbyn's party have evicted the Trad Lab local government nexus in the heartlands. I've written before how I once knew well, liked and respected the old Labour culture in south Yorkshire. We share many values; a passion for fairness, equity, probity, transparency, stewardship, trust and democracy. Our beliefs are grounded in a moral absolutism that is Christian in character. We believe in merit, in the rewards of ability and application, and deprecate everything that Corbyn's Labour stands for - privilege, nepotism, moral relativity, racism and discrimination, avarice, partiality, dishonesty, twisted political manipulation, bullying, stitch-ups and corruption. 

Where the trad Lab people and structures are still in place, the Labour vote will hold up. Where the Corbynites have taken over, openings will be created - and we are starting to see the rise of new, Labour-replacement parties, locally focused, with no London blow-ins, party functionaries, remote from the Corbynista nomenklatura. Ieuan Joy in the 'graph describes them as 'microparties'. Of course my own party will hope to make inroads here in May - but trad Lab voters I know will be reluctant to vote for the local businessmen who will stand as Tory councillors in red wall country. Boris was different. These places are not Tory, though the voters are conservative. The mill owner and the landlord are still the enemies.

The hate parties and personalities will also seek to make inroads here in May, looking to exploit local tensions. Social media users will know that they have started their campaigns already. I have great confidence in the ability of local voters to dismiss them. They are rightly loathed every bit as much as Corbyn's NKVD.

I used the meme below as part of a jokey dig at Labour in the December election, but after the voices in the media questioning, following the suspension of Phillips, just how nasty and authoritarian the metropolitan party can get, it will raise just a scintilla of real caution. It's what parties such as the one Corbyn, Milne and McDonnell want to create can become.

 

09/03/20
EU/EEA and the UK	Cases	Deaths
Italy	7375	366
France	1126	19
Germany	902	0
Spain	589	5
United Kingdom	273	3
Netherlands	265	3
Sweden	203	0
Belgium	200	0
Norway	169	0
Austria	102	0
Greece	73	0
Iceland	55	0
Denmark	38	0
Czech Republic	32	0
Portugal	30	0
Finland	30	0
Ireland	21	0
Slovenia	16	0
Romania	15	0
Croatia	12	0
Poland	11	0
Estonia	10	0
Hungary	8	0
Slovakia	5	0
Luxembourg	5	0
Bulgaria	4	0
Malta	3	0
Latvia	3	0
Lithuania	1	0
Liechtenstein	1	0
Total	11577	396

The death of Labour

I've known quite a few Labourites down the years. In South Yorkshire being Labour was as much a part of life as the Yorkshire main coal seam 1km under our feet. These were Ian Austins to a man, believers in hard work, social responsibility, a mixed economy, a strong defence and Trident. Amongst them were the last batch of national servicemen and those who wore the pair of the UN bronze and distinctive blue and yellow ribboned campaign medals of the Korean war. They tried hard, really hard, not to say 'love' 'dear' or 'pet' when asking young women for a cup of tea, knowing but not quite understanding that this now gave offence.

In London, I knew a far greater variety of Labourites. There were communities - Irish, Jewish - who traditionally looked to the party as a collective defence against the abuses and depredations of the tribal English. There were the Windrush generation of Commonwealth immigrants who joined them for much the same reasons. There were a great mass of Londoners, minor consumers of the Welfare State, who wanted decent homes at affordable rents in which to live on their wages as bus drivers or council clerks. For the most part they were Ian Austins, too. There were the actors, poets and artists from the French and the Colony Room. Soho's last lamplighter. Those employed in higher and further education, where labour allegiance was a sort of membership worn lightly in case they should want to 'go into politics' if they failed to get that departmental headship yet again.

Of course there were the nasty Labourites, too. The bullying and grasping TU officials (including one bane of my own managerial life; when he was exposed in the 'Sun' as a serial groper and sex abuser and sacked by his own union, which he took to a tribunal, my rejoicing was great). There were the nasty local councillors bent with greed or corrupt with petty power, drunks, bullies, haters and frauds. All those who used the party as a ladder to support their own foulness. But one meets such people everywhere.

All the above one could tag as 'mostly harmless'. Many will have voted 'Leave' in the referendum. Many will only now, in this election, come to realise that their party is dead, taken-over by a cynical and dangerous cabal of Marxist opportunists who care nothing for their wishes and beliefs, who will not reward their loyalty. Even the Noncefinder General, himself not an attractive human being, has jumped ship. The Jewish Chronicle screams warnings. John Woodcock, Tom Harris and Michael McCann, former Labour bigwigs, say don't vote for Corbyn.

Lay up those silk banners. The party is disbanded. Labour is dead.

Will Labour ditch Magic Grandad before the General Election?

As far as Brexit goes, Labour's Magic Grandad is one of the party's few MPs actually standing for both working-class principles and the Party's 2017 manifesto. His commitment to leaving the EU echoes the real (though often misdirected) passion for democracy expressed by the late Tony Benn. As MEPs vote today on Von Der Layen's appointment some fools will call the process democratic. In the video below Benn makes the point that MEPs are not elected in the UK - parties are. Voters have no say on the members returned to Brussels by the parties, and can't vote to get rid of individual MEPs.



Benn's and Magic Grandad's views on the EU - that is it wholly detrimental to the interests of the working class in Britain - are not shared by the new breed of establishment 'progressives' who have adopted the Labour Party for convenience. For most of them it could have been the LibDems or parts of the Conservative Party - the present Parliamentary parties are currently largely homogeneous, Blairite and managerialist in character, opposed to Brexit and determined to frustrate the nation's democratic instruction.

However, these Blairite managerialists are determined to take over the Labour Party, defenestrate Magic Grandad and campaign wholeheartedly on a 'Remain' ticket in the forthcoming General Election. Lady Nugee, with all the bearing and presence of a large garden party marquee (200 seated or 400 standing) said so.

Short of Labour splitting into two parties - a northern, industrial Free Labour Party supporting Brexit and a southern metropolitan Labour House (members only) supporting remain - the managerialists will have to ditch Magic Grandad. And that may prove extraordinarily difficult in the time available. So I guess what we'll end up with is an official Labour front bench that is both on the record as Leave and Remain, depending who is being interviewed. Confused voters will simply desert Labour.

That of course is exacly in favour of the true heirs to Benn's Euroscepticism - The Brexit Party.

Labour's shocking Jew-hatred

Last night's shocking Panorama exposed the depth of anti-semitism in the Labour party, a disease that goes to the very top. A shameful litany of crude Nazi tropes, ugly agitprop and a thuggish bullying of Jewish Labour members that would have made an SA man proud. That such evil exists still, when the last few precious holocaust survivors, our living link with that dark chapter in mankind's history, are also leaving us is both harrowing and shameful.

It is not, however, new.

Before WWII the Labour party was enamoured of eugenics and the politics of racial hygiene in much the same way as the Nazi party. I wrote about it in 2012, referencing a Guardian piece by Jonathan Freedland entitled 'Eugenics: the skeleton that rattles loudest in the left's closet' that warned presciently that unless Labour faced its fascist roots, it would not escape the consequences. Today, unusually, I will quote that seven-year old post whole.

18th February 2012
When I have previously catalogued on here the shared ideology between the British left and the Nazi party, an ideology based on racial purity, Eugenics, State control over breeding and marriage and the horror of 'involuntary euthanasia', or State murder, an ideology that persisted in Polly Toynbee's beloved left wing Scandinavian countries into the 1970s with compulsory sterilisation, I'm sure some readers have thought the parallels a little forced. Bernard Shaw wanted to kill the poor with a 'humane lethal gas'; more tellingly he also wanted to rid Britain of Jews, writing to Beatrice Webb he wrote

We ought to tackle the Jewish question by admitting the right of States to make eugenic experiments by weeding out any strains they think undesirable, but insisting they do it as humanely as they can afford to

No doubt also subjecting them to a 'humane lethal gas'. Along with Shaw, the Webbs and HG Wells, even Virginia Woolf was a supporter of State murder; after passing a line of the profoundly mentally ill, she wrote "Imbeciles - every one of them a miserable, ineffective, shuffling, idiotic creature. It was perfectly horrible. They should certainly be killed."

After 1945 and the horror of the extermination camps, the Labour Party quickly performed one of those acts of collective amnesia and wiped all memory of their own National Socialist agenda from the record. Just as that loathsome gulag-apologist Nye Bevan has been resurrected as some sort of saint. But no longer am I alone in daring to say these things, it seems.

Jonathan Freedland writes today in the Guardian that it's time the Labour Party and the British left faced up to their poisonous ideological legacy. Until they do, he implies, the worth of each individual human soul will still be subjugated to a left ideology of collective good;

Progressives face a particular challenge, to cast off a mentality that can too easily regard people as means rather than ends. For in this respect a movement is just like a person: it never entirely escapes its roots.