You are getting death threats from unidentified people on Twitter, are you? Well, I once had an actual attempt on my life, organised from within the constituency office of the then Government Chief Whip. And I am the victim of an active death threat from one nuclear-armed state on behalf of two others.
Standing for Parliament in North West Durham at the next General Election. No party affiliation. Freelance journalist, available for work. Contact davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Accepts PayPal. #VoteDavidLindsay
Monday 18 December 2017
Radical Routes
Of course Chris Grayling's proposal to replace local bus services with "something like Uber" is ridiculous and offensive. But even that would be an improvement on Durham County Council's slashing of bus services as if possessed.
Those responsible for that slashing would have lost control of the Council if those with the power to deliver that result had listened to me, instead of listening to the political advice of a man who is now the Political Advisor to a Member of Parliament. Moreover, as a result of the fact that certain people took that advice instead of mine, 472 Teaching Assistants are still on course to lose 23 per cent of their pay.
Those responsible for that slashing would have lost control of the Council if those with the power to deliver that result had listened to me, instead of listening to the political advice of a man who is now the Political Advisor to a Member of Parliament. Moreover, as a result of the fact that certain people took that advice instead of mine, 472 Teaching Assistants are still on course to lose 23 per cent of their pay.
We need the renationalisation of the rail services as each franchise came up for renewal, and thus at no cost, as the backbone of a rebuilt network of public transport, eventually free at the point of use, and prior to that requiring the approval of the House of Commons for any increase in fares, with the cost of HS2 diverted to reconnecting many towns to the rail network.
In any case, Uber's days are numbered. Over to the unions and the councils to set up their own. It's an app. It's not hard to do. This could all be built into the existing black cab trade. With Uber out of the way, then the black cabs would not be undercut if they adopted the technology. All overseen by the councils and the unions. It could be integrated with Oyster and everything. Everyone would love it. They would rapidly wonder how they ever got by without it.
The Knowledge is no more a "restrictive practice" than a medical or a legal qualification is. The same was true of many working-class protections that have been lost. Let this be the beginning of their restoration. No satnav in the world could ever match The Knowledge, or that latter would no longer exist, still less would it command such healthy remuneration. This is a moment to be seized. The technology now effectively belongs only to the people. Seize this moment.
The Knowledge is no more a "restrictive practice" than a medical or a legal qualification is. The same was true of many working-class protections that have been lost. Let this be the beginning of their restoration. No satnav in the world could ever match The Knowledge, or that latter would no longer exist, still less would it command such healthy remuneration. This is a moment to be seized. The technology now effectively belongs only to the people. Seize this moment.
Thursday 14 December 2017
Points of Interest
Just like that, we are told that there will, or will not, be any change in interest rates. It was not ever thus. This is the Original Sin of New Labour.
In redemption, we need the reassertion of democratic political control over the Bank of England, including that the approval of the House of Commons be required for changes to interest rates. And we need the assertion of democratic political control over the City of London, with a Glass-Steagall style of division between investment banking and retail banking, with the extension of that principle to crack down on loan sharks throughout society, and with a criminal investigation into the privatisation of the Royal Mail.
Together with the closure of all tax havens under British jurisdiction unless they opted for independence instead, leading to the incorporation of all four parts of the United Kingdom, of all nine English regions, of all of the Crown Dependencies, and of all of the British Overseas Territories, into the Belt and Road Initiative.
In order to bring about these changes, we need to secure the election to the City of London Corporation, the election to the States of Jersey, the election to the States of Guernsey, the election to Tynwald, the election to the legislatures of the British Overseas Territories, and the appointment to the House of Lords while it exists, of supporters of economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends.
And we need to effect the transfer of the exercise of the Royal Prerogative, including Royal Assent, to six or seven out of nine Co-Presidents elected nationally by each of us voting for one candidate so that the top nine would be elected.
Alongside a new second chamber elected by the 99 lieutenancy areas, with each of us voting for one candidate so that the top six would be elected. And alongside the 50 Commons seats that would otherwise be abolished by the boundary changes, filled by a national election, with each of us voting for one candidate so that the top 50 would be elected.
Make it happen.
Make it happen.
Reach For The Sky
Rupert Murdoch is a proper old newsman, second generation, from a world that has very nearly passed away. Even in 2017, he has chosen print over broadcasting and streaming. What now for Sky News? Well, be on the bus, or be under it. If you are not at the table, then you are on the menu.
There are positions that the BBC simply ignores.
The workers, and not the liberal bourgeoisie, as the key swing voters. Identity issues located within the struggle for economic equality and for international peace.
The leading role in the defence of universal public services of those who would otherwise lack basic amenities, and in the promotion of peace of those who would be the first to be called upon to die in wars.
The decision of the EU referendum by areas that voted Labour, Liberal Democrat or Plaid Cymru.
Opposition from the start to the failed programme of economic austerity.
Against all Governments since 1997, opposition to the privatisation of the NHS and other public services, to the persecution of the disabled, to the assault on civil liberties, to every British military intervention during that period, to Britain’s immoral and one-sided relationship with Saudi Arabia, and to the demonisation of Russia.
Rejection of any approach to climate change which would threaten jobs, workers’ rights, the right to have children, travel opportunities, or universal access to a full diet.
Rescue of issues such as male suicide, men’s health, and fathers’ rights from those whose economic and other policies have caused the problems.
And refusal to recognise racists, Fascists or opportunists as the authentic voices of the accepted need to control immigration.
The new owners of Sky News ought to identify and include representatives of the traditions that those and other marginalised views express in practice. We stand ready to serve.
Monday 11 December 2017
Officially More Dangerous Than George Galloway
Next season's programme for the Gala Theatre, Durham arrives with a message from Ossie Johnson. Ossie needs to consider that the County Council's savage cuts to bus services, not least affecting his own ward (where a bus stop is named after his house), have largely excluded from cultural life many of us disabled people who used to participate in it.
Those responsible for that exclusion would have lost control of the Council if those with the power to deliver that result had listened to me, instead of listening to the political advice of a man who is now the Political Advisor to the Member of Parliament whose constituency contains Ossie's ward, where she now resides.
As a result of the fact that certain people took that advice instead of mine, 472 Teaching Assistants are still on course to lose 23 per cent of their pay. But then, can anyone name a specific austerity measure against which that MP, Laura Pidcock, ever voted during her time on Northumberland County Council?
That question might usefully be asked at a meeting of her Constituency Labour Party, which I am aghast to discover still exists, despite the ruling of the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party that no one in North West Durham was capable of being a parliamentary candidate. Anyone not sharing that assessment might consider that there is a world elsewhere.
I do hope that George Galloway, who with Alex Watson remains one of my Campaign Patrons, is successful in his quest for readmission to the Labour Party. Unless I am very much mistaken, then that would leave me as the only person alive who remained subject to a lifetime ban. Being officially more dangerous than George Galloway would be too delicious for words.
But I intend to vote Labour at the next General Election. And I wish Laura no ill. I assert that the following is an accurate summary of her view: "It is blatantly obvious that David Lindsay is innocent, that there is absolutely no evidence against him, that the charge against him should be dropped, that the complaint against him should be withdrawn, and that any and all Police files on him should be closed." She is free to deny that that is an accurate summary of her view. Until that time, however, it stands as such. And why, therefore, would I stand against her?
I do hope that George Galloway, who with Alex Watson remains one of my Campaign Patrons, is successful in his quest for readmission to the Labour Party. Unless I am very much mistaken, then that would leave me as the only person alive who remained subject to a lifetime ban. Being officially more dangerous than George Galloway would be too delicious for words.
But I intend to vote Labour at the next General Election. And I wish Laura no ill. I assert that the following is an accurate summary of her view: "It is blatantly obvious that David Lindsay is innocent, that there is absolutely no evidence against him, that the charge against him should be dropped, that the complaint against him should be withdrawn, and that any and all Police files on him should be closed." She is free to deny that that is an accurate summary of her view. Until that time, however, it stands as such. And why, therefore, would I stand against her?
Saturday 9 December 2017
A 2018 General Election?
A few days ago, I thought that a General Election next year was unlikely. But never bet against anything these days. My trial has been delayed until 11th April, a year after the so-called conclusive evidence supposedly turned up, while they purport to be looking for that or any other evidence against me. They have yet to find any. Really, though, this is so that my trial will either be after a General Election that I would therefore find it difficult to contest, or else so close to one as effectively to preclude my candidacy.
I wish that I had stood this year. I would not have won. But I would have taken enough votes to ensure that Laura Pidcock was elected with fewer than 50 per cent of the total. That might have restrained her a little, which would have been good for all concerned. The Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats might also have felt emboldened to challenge the fact that she had clearly given an false address on the paperwork. Whatever the outcome of that, then it, too, might have cooled her head a little, and stayed her tongue. Most people now expect this to be a Conservative seat within three electoral cycles. Ho, hum, I shall be well over 50 by then.
This seat could do with an MP from the Left who was capable of political co-operation and personal friendship with people of all political allegiances and none, who was unsullied by any connection to the present Leadership of Durham County Council, and whom it was impossible to imagine describing the third or more of this constituency that voted Conservative in 2017 as "the enemy". That phrase recalls Margaret Thatcher's attitude to the miners.
But I wish Laura no ill. I intend to vote Labour at the next General Election. I assert that the following is an accurate summary of her view: "It is blatantly obvious that David Lindsay is innocent, that there is absolutely no evidence against him, that the charge against him should be dropped, that the complaint against him should be withdrawn, and that any and all Police files on him should be closed." She is free to deny that that is an accurate summary of her view. Until that time, however, it stands as such. And why, therefore, would I stand against her?
But I wish Laura no ill. I intend to vote Labour at the next General Election. I assert that the following is an accurate summary of her view: "It is blatantly obvious that David Lindsay is innocent, that there is absolutely no evidence against him, that the charge against him should be dropped, that the complaint against him should be withdrawn, and that any and all Police files on him should be closed." She is free to deny that that is an accurate summary of her view. Until that time, however, it stands as such. And why, therefore, would I stand against her?
Thursday 7 December 2017
Go The Extra Mile
I am told that there is now little chance that a figure of the extreme right-wing Labour machine on Durham County Council could expect the Labour nomination at North Durham when Kevan Jones retired, and in fact more chance that Kevan might be leaving sooner than he had anticipated.
But Carl Marshall needs to know this: if he does not want me to contest every election that he did for the rest of his life or mine, whichever ended sooner, then he knows what he has to do.
But Carl Marshall needs to know this: if he does not want me to contest every election that he did for the rest of his life or mine, whichever ended sooner, then he knows what he has to do.
Wednesday 6 December 2017
April Shower
I knew that I would not be spending Christmas in prison. I now know that I shall not be spending Easter in prison, either. My trial has been put back to 11th April next year. I was charged on 13th April this year, having been arrested on 14th March. The judge was no happier than I was, but the Crown Prosecution Service is still insisting on two or three days to try no evidence whatever, including further no evidence whatever that they profess to need another four months, over and above the eight months that they have already had and the ninth month that the Police had before that, in order to uncover.
Certain public figures received one of those unhinged communications which they receive very regularly, and a highly ambitious councillor, whose identity is common knowledge in these parts, took the opportunity to curry favour with those in a position to arrange the Labour nomination for a certain safe seat when the sitting MP retires, by using that communication to seek to remove an outspoken and, though I say so myself, an energetic opponent of the local municipal Labour machine.
But this has now gone on for an outrageous length of time, entirely at public expense, and there are now, unlike in the first instance, credible threats to the safety of numerous people, including me, but more to the point including teenagers. Those threats have not been not been posted once, from Durham or thereabouts, and referring to a local dispute. They have been posted at least twice, from thousands of miles away, from a country that I have never visited, and referring to major international conflicts. This needs to end. That councillor needs to withdraw the complaint. Or, frankly, expect to face me at the polls when that opportunity next presents itself.
More broadly, we need reversal of the erosion of trial by jury and of the right to silence, reversal of the existing reversals of the burden of proof, abolition of conviction by majority verdict (which, by definition, provides for conviction even where there is reasonable doubt), extension throughout the United Kingdom of the Scots Law requirement for corroborating evidence, requirement that the prosecution present its case within three months of charge or else that case be dismissed, abolition of the admission of anonymous evidence other than from undercover Police Officers, exclusion of the possibility of conviction on anonymous evidence alone, restoration of the provision that no acquitted person should ever have to stand trial again for the same offence (the previous change to this having now done its job in the Stephen Lawrence case), a return to preventative policing based on foot patrols, Police Forces at least no larger than at present, restoration of the pre-1968 committal powers of the magistracy, restoration of the pre-1985 prosecution powers of the Police, restoration of the network of police stations and police houses placing the Police at the very heart of their communities, and disbandment of MI5 in favour Police Officers who, while highly specialised, were nevertheless part of accountable community policing. Among very much else besides. Make it happen.
Tuesday 5 December 2017
Fares Fair
The biggest hike in rail fares in five years will be coming next month, with an average increase of 3.4 per cent. With the cost of HS2 diverted to reconnecting many towns to the rail network, we need the renationalisation of the rail services as each franchise came up for renewal, and thus at no cost, as the backbone of a rebuilt network of public transport, eventually free at the point of use, and prior to that requiring the approval of the House of Commons for any increase in fares. Make it happen.
Monday 4 December 2017
Court and Circular
I still have to turn up to Durham Crown Court at 10 o'clock on Wednesday morning, 6th December. But only to be told what my new trial date is going to be, doubtless well into 2018, and thus anything up to a year after I was arrested, perhaps even a year after I was charged. They have nothing. Nothing. But they are determined to spin out this shameful and shameless political hit job to the last possible moment. In the meantime, please give generously to the reason why they are determined to take me down, which is the reason why I am determined that they never will.
Saturday 25 November 2017
Please Support Me On Patreon
I am a writer, broadcaster and political activist who is not a member of any political party. I am happy to work with people of all parties and of none. My national and international work is focused on participating in the formulation, articulation and implementation of the alternative to neoliberal economic policy and to neoconservative foreign policy. In my own case, that is based on the pursuit of economic equality and of international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends.
Locally, I support justice for the 472 of Durham County Council’s Teaching Assistants who are still set to lose 23 per cent of their pay, I am working to bring Volkswagen’s production for the British market to County Durham after Brexit, I am seeking to provide a platform for the concerns expressed by and to the non-Labour majority of County and Parish Councillors in the North West Durham parliamentary constituency, and I intend to identify in each ward of the former Districts of Derwentside and Wear Valley a number of projects equal to the former number of District Councillors in order to campaign in support of those projects.
Locally, I support justice for the 472 of Durham County Council’s Teaching Assistants who are still set to lose 23 per cent of their pay, I am working to bring Volkswagen’s production for the British market to County Durham after Brexit, I am seeking to provide a platform for the concerns expressed by and to the non-Labour majority of County and Parish Councillors in the North West Durham parliamentary constituency, and I intend to identify in each ward of the former Districts of Derwentside and Wear Valley a number of projects equal to the former number of District Councillors in order to campaign in support of those projects.
Thursday 23 November 2017
This Needs To End Now
With less than a fortnight to go until the showiest trial this side of Pyongyang, I have been informed by the ever-excellent Durham Constabulary that our old friends "the defenders of Bharat, the defenders of Eretz Israel" have once again been writing from the United States, a county that I have never visited.
This time, they have been writing to prominent but non-political figures in these parts. They have not only repeated their death threats against me (and possibly against others, although I have not been told that), but they have also extended those threats to "the teenage sons of female Police Officers". Those will be killed if I am not convicted and imprisoned, "the teenage sons of female Police Officers".
This whole business has now crossed a line even by its own standards hitherto. Durham Police Federation must now demand that the charge against me be dropped and that any Police file on me be closed, as must every Member of Parliament and every County Council representing any teenage son of a female Police Officer. That is almost certainly all of them, and certainly all of the MPs.
Look, what do you want me to do? Forgo any claim to financial compensation? I would do it. Undertake never to seek any elected political office that I did not currently hold? I would do it. I am not asking for the Crown Prosecution Service to admit that it never had a case against me, even though it never did. I am not asking for the Council Council election in Lanchester that Labour, although not the candidates themselves, won by these nefarious means to be rerun at expense to the community at large.
Just drop the charge against me, close any and all Police files on me, and concentrate on protecting, not so much me, as others besides, now even including "the teenage sons of female Police Officers", from the intercontinental "defenders of Bharat, defenders of Eretz Isreal", who have defined themselves in the past as the heirs of Nuthurum Godse and of Moshe Sneh, and who are clearly bad and possibly mad, but who are not joking.
They hate me. The likes of Simon Henig hate me. But we trust that only one of those categories is prepared to see "the teenage sons of female Police Officers" go to their graves for the sake of its hatred of me. The one with quite literally more firepower than a single fingerprint that turned up seven months to the day after I had been charged and which may or may not have been mine (it is not), on one side but not the other of a folded piece of paper that any of hundreds of people might have touched, but not on the envelope in which it had been posted, an envelope that bears no trace of my DNA where it had been sealed.
This needs to end. Now.
They hate me. The likes of Simon Henig hate me. But we trust that only one of those categories is prepared to see "the teenage sons of female Police Officers" go to their graves for the sake of its hatred of me. The one with quite literally more firepower than a single fingerprint that turned up seven months to the day after I had been charged and which may or may not have been mine (it is not), on one side but not the other of a folded piece of paper that any of hundreds of people might have touched, but not on the envelope in which it had been posted, an envelope that bears no trace of my DNA where it had been sealed.
This needs to end. Now.
Sunday 19 November 2017
Acquiescing To The Forces
This letter does not appear in The Observer, despite having been signed by a prominent former MP and by a Lobby journalist:
Dear Sir,
Next year will mark the tenth anniversary of the Great Crash, and the fifteenth anniversary of the catastrophic invasion of Iraq. In the scandalously arranged absence of Bernie Sanders, President Trump has been elected by the American individuals, families, communities and areas that have suffered most as a result of politically chosen austerity, and which have given most to wars of political choice. The British individuals, families, communities and areas that have suffered most as a result of politically chosen austerity, and which have given most to wars of political choice, have elected Jeremy Corbyn as Leader of the Labour Party, have delivered the referendum vote to leave the European Union, have re-elected Corbyn even more overwhelmingly, and have deprived the Conservative Party of its overall majority in the House of Commons.
Yet Trump is, predictably, acquiescing to the forces against which his supporters voted, while Brexit is being negotiated, insofar as it is being negotiated at all, in precisely the interests of which the referendum result was a comprehensive rejection. In the midst of this, the senior newspaper of the Anglophone liberal tradition is disgracing itself by peddling a bad James Bond parody in which Hillary Clinton and the Remain campaign, limitlessly funded and with almost entirely sympathetic media coverage, were defeated by tweets and Facebook posts from the Kremlin.
Instead of this nonsense, The Observer needs to be participating in the formulation, articulation and implementation of the alternative to neoliberal economic policy and to neoconservative foreign policy, based on the pursuit of economic equality and of international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including a Leader of the Labour Party who is, and who deserves to be, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
Yours faithfully,
David Lindsay, Lanchester, County Durham; @davidaslindsay
George Galloway, broadcaster and former MP; @georgegalloway
Nadeem Ahmed, Birmingham Yardley; @Muqadaam
Sean Caden, Leeds; @HUNSLETWHITE
Neil Clark, journalist and broadcaster; @NeilClark66
James Draper, Lanchester, County Durham
Krystyna Koseda, Essex; @kossy65
John Sweeney, Islington North Constituency Labour Party (personal capacity); @johnsweeney18
John Sweeney, Islington North Constituency Labour Party (personal capacity); @johnsweeney18
Matt Turner, Evolve Politics (personal capacity), @MattTurner4L
Friday 17 November 2017
Shining A Light
It ought to be in almanacs: Lumiere means the first woolly socks of the year. I know that I shall love it this evening. I always love Lumiere. But we are talking about a million pounds from the County Council. The language of priorities, I'm afraid.
Some rural communities have had their common or garden street lighting taken away from them. The buses have been cut to the bone, making it difficult or impossible for many disabled and other people to attend Lumiere.
And, thanks to the political advice of a man who is now a high profile new MP's Political Advisor, 472 Teaching Assistants are still being left behind, continuing to lose 23 per cent of their pay. I reject that betrayal out of hand, and I will fight it to my last breath. This campaign has greatly awakened my interest in new patterns of trade unionism.
Durham County Council is the last outpost of bad old New Labour, snarling that, "You have nowhere else to go." Well, we shall see about that. And before anyone tries, I do not mean that my own somewhere else to go is prison.
One month to the day after I had been arrested, they took six hours to charge me on the strength of a pair of fingerprints that turned out, six months later again to the day, to have been a single fingerprint that may or may not have been mine (it is not), on one side but not the other of a folded piece of paper that any of hundreds of people might have touched, but not on the envelope in which it was posted, an envelope that bears no trace of my DNA where it was sealed.
Such contortions would be beyond me even if I were not as arthritic as I am. The prosecution has added physical impossibility to the moral impossibility of my having committed this offence, which latter is the publicly recorded view of every member of Durham County Council who has ever met me. It is also a matter of public record that the Police would not have charged me.
Come my trial date on Wednesday 6th December, consider that if anything else has purportedly turned up, then there had been absolutely no sign of it during the preceding eight months of this campaign of persecution at scandalous public expense.
Come my trial date on Wednesday 6th December, consider that if anything else has purportedly turned up, then there had been absolutely no sign of it during the preceding eight months of this campaign of persecution at scandalous public expense.
It may harm your prosecution if you do not mention now something that you later rely on in court. Or, at any rate, it should.
Monday 13 November 2017
10 Reasons To Want To Send Me To Prison
One week on from my formal complaint against the Crown Prosecution Service for endangering life by persisting with the Leadership of Durham County Council's baseless vendetta against me, why is it doing so, even now?
First, and most obviously, because I have dared to fight back. They held my First Hearing somewhere that they assumed that I could not reach on time by the public transport on which I was dependent. But I was there. They sent me for an unrequested psychiatric assessment with a view to having me committed. But I was pronounced to have no mental health issues whatever, something that presumably a psychiatrist rarely sees, as an oncologist would rarely see anyone with no symptom that could possibly indicate cancer.
They took six hours to charge me on the strength of a pair of fingerprints that turned out, six months later to the day, to have been a single fingerprint that may or may not have been mine (it is not), on one side but not the other of a folded piece of paper that any of hundreds of people might have touched, but not on the envelope in which it was posted, an envelope that bears no trace of my DNA where it was sealed. Such contortions would be beyond me even if I were not as arthritic as I am. The prosecution has added physical impossibility to the moral impossibility of my having committed this offence, which latter is the publicly recorded view of every member of Durham County Council who has ever met me. It is also a matter of public record that the Police would not have charged me.
My persecutors have ruled out all of my 32 character witnesses, including past and present members of both Houses of Parliament, members of Durham County Council (among whom were three of the famous 57), distinguished members of the Catholic and Anglican clergy, a Presiding Justice, and several other Justices of the Peace. But at least one of those has simply sent it in anyway, and this whole move has given me the opportunity to say that the testimony of any one of those people, never mind those of 32 of them, would have been enough to preclude any realistic possibility that 10 out of 12 randomly chosen jurors might have found me guilty of anything.
While all of this has been going on, I have been elected as a Governor of County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust, a position from which I have undertaken to resign if convicted, regardless of my sentence, so confident am I that that will not come to pass. It is universally acknowledged that I would have been elected to Durham County Council and to Lanchester Parish Council if this had not being hanging over me, a full and frank acknowledgement by the County Durham Labour Party that it could not have beaten me in a fair fight. I am now a declared candidate for election as County Durham and Darlington's Police, Crime and Victims' Commissioner in 2020, an electoral process in which the continuation of this action is now an unwarranted interference. I am regularly asked whether I am on the Bench "yet". Never say never.
Secondly, the cause of my wholly unexpected return to local politics was the County Council's despicable mistreatment of its Teaching Assistants. Among other things, I secured the support of several national trade union leaders for the TAs, I secured their landmark meeting with Jeremy Corbyn the night before the 2016 Durham Miners' Gala, I thus secured Corbyn's endorsement of them from the platform of the Gala, I secured the signature of Angela Rayner on their petition, I marched with her alongside them, I secured the support for them that George Galloway has regularly expressed on his radio programme and to his quarter of a million followers on Twitter, and I wrote and sent the letter to the Northern Echo in which he and others called for a vote against all Labour candidates for the County Council while comparing its Leadership to Mike Ashley and to the National Coal Board.
Had that advice been followed, then the dispute would by now have been resolved entirely in the TAs' favour. That it not been has been because of the political advice of someone who is now a Political Advisor to a Member of Parliament. Thanks to that political advice, 472 Teaching Assistants are to be left behind, continuing to lose 23 per cent of their pay. I reject that betrayal out of hand, and I will fight it to my last breath. This campaign has greatly awakened my interest in new patterns of trade unionism.
Thirdly, while I am firmly a man of the Left, believing in economic equality and in international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, I am a lifelong proponent and practitioner of co-operation across all parties and none. Jeremy Corbyn is the most culturally significant and ubiquitous British politician in living memory, the most agenda-setting Leader of the Opposition ever, and the global leader of the opposition to neoliberal economic policy and to neoconservative foreign policy. That critique needs to be co-ordinated at home and abroad, in preparation for the Corbyn Government that will lead Britain and the world out of politically chosen austerity, and away from wars of political choice.
It needs, however, to draw on a very wide range of traditions and insights. My new magazine, The Weekly Standard, will do that from as early as possible next year, for all the efforts to obstruct it, and thus to deny the voices of Jeremy Corbyn, George Galloway and others across the spectrum, to readers with an interest in football, or pop music, or popular television, all of which we shall be covering just as seriously. I agree on many things with Peter Hitchens, and on quite a few with Peter Oborne. I have been published, even for payment, in The American Conservative, and I have close links to the paleoconservatives, including to one of their rising stars over here, who is one of my two strongest local supporters, both of whom will be writing for the Standard. As will my other brace of protégés, who are even more youthful again, . One of them has lately gone from Momentum to AltRight to whatever comes after that, but I shall bring him round in due season. We were all young once.
This year was the first time since the introduction of unitary local government that, being unable to vote Labour because of the Teaching Assistants, I did not vote both for a Labour and for an Independent candidate for the County Council. Heartbreakingly, it was also the first time that I ever declined an opportunity to vote for Ossie Johnson for anything, having given him my first ever vote, at a District Council by-election while I was still in the Upper Sixth and uniformed accordingly, and having voted for him whenever the occasion presented itself during the intervening 21 years, which is more than half my lifetime. I experienced a physical pain at being unable to vote for Ossie this time.
Even when I chaired the Labour Party in Lanchester, it thankfully never put up a full slate of Parish Council candidates, so I have never voted exclusively for those of one persuasion. This year, I voted, as I have always done, for 15 candidates to fill the 15 seats on the Lanchester Parish Council on which I myself served for many years. 12 of those candidates were elected. Among those 12 were, and are, Labour, Independent, Conservative and Liberal Democrat representatives. No one on that Council would have been elected on the votes of people who had voted only Labour, or only Independent, or only Conservative, or only Liberal Democrat. Such ballot papers were submitted, but I was at the count, and I can assure you that there were not enough of them to have elected anyone. Everyone who was elected ought to keep that in mind.
At the four European Elections of my adult lifetime, I have voted Socialist Labour, Respect, No2EU, and Labour. At General Elections, I voted Labour in 1997, for which no one of my generation will ever apologise; if you did not grow up under the Major "Government", then you cannot possibly understand. I voted Labour through gritted teeth in 2001, for a local Independent who did strikingly well in 2005, for him again in 2010 in protest at the imposition of all-women shortlist on the Constituency Labour Party here, and proudly for Pat Glass and Ed Miliband in 2015. I would have voted for Pat again. As it is, I shall never forgive the Labour Party in County Durham for having deprived me, by its treatment of the Teaching Assistants, of the opportunity to participate in the Great Corbyn Surge of 2017. But Grahame Morris was the only County Durham MP to be seeking re-election and to have earned the votes of the TAs' supporters. The Labour candidate here had walked out of their Solidarity Rally a few weeks before.
Instead, therefore, I voted for Owen Temple, the Liberal Democrat who, as a County Councillor, was and is one of the two most stalwart supporters of the TAs. The other was and is his Independent wardmate, Alex Watson, who is, with George Galloway, one of my Campaign Patrons. I was closely associated with Alex's former Labour Leadership of the former Derwentside District Council, which was conducted, highly successfully, in partnership with the Independents against the Labour faction that now controls the unitary County Council. Had Alex or one of his senior allies been willing to break with Labour in 2010, then he would have been the First Past the Post for this parliamentary seat, including with my vote.
I intend to vote Labour at the next General Election, come what may. In relation to my MP, Laura Pidcock, I am the Leader of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition. I wish her well, but Labour holds fewer than half the County Council seats here, Laura's own office is in Owen's and Alex's non-Labour ward where Jeremy Corbyn was last week shown visiting Greggs, and the Conservatives took 34 per cent of the vote in this constituency even with a candidate whose address on the ballot paper was in Sussex. It really will not do to describe more than one third of one's constituents in terms reminiscent of Margaret Thatcher's description of the miners. Laura is very young, she is from outside the area, and it shows. But there is time yet, and she is here now, living in Lanchester. The circumstances of her imposition will always rankle with those of my own or a similar age who retained their Labour Party membership cards, but that is not my concern. I have always been fairly crossparty and nonparty, and I have now been nothing else for longer than I was ever in the Labour Party.
In that spirit, fourthly, while I am the first to say that Corbyn ought to be Prime Minister instead of Theresa May, I firmly contend that she was the only Conservative Leader who could have prevented him from winning an overall majority this year, I hugely admire her world-leading work against human trafficking and modern slavery, and I wish that she would get on with implementing her original agenda of workers' and consumers' representation in corporate governance, of shareholders' control over executive pay, of restrictions on pay differentials within companies, of an investment-based Industrial Strategy and infrastructure programme, of greatly increased housebuilding, of action against tax avoidance, of a ban on public contracts for tax-avoiding companies (including, Your Majesty, "The Firm", with its public contract to provide a Head of State), of a cap on energy prices, of banning or greatly restricting foreign takeovers, of a ban on unpaid internships, and of an inquiry into Orgreave. The parliamentary majorities for all of these are in existence. The Prime Minister just needs to look beyond her own party.
As, in view of the fact that there is a hung Parliament, she ought to be doing, anyway. In the words of a letter that I wrote in August, and which was sent over several signatures to several newspapers, "We warmly welcome the billion pound investment in jobs and services in Northern Ireland. We call for Scotland, Wales, and each of the nine English regions to receive the same per capita. Anything less would make a mockery of the very names of the Conservative and Unionist Party, and of the Democratic Unionist Party. The DUP has never disputed the existence of the so-called Magic Money Tree. At least in practice, that existence is now fully acknowledged by the Conservative Party as well. Let the abundant fruits of that Tree be harvested throughout the United Kingdom." It might have done better if it had been sent over the scores of signatures from academic economists, trade union leaders, commentators and activists that it would have borne if not for the ongoing campaign against me by the nominally Labour Leadership of Durham County Council. That Leadership, of course, has done nothing but preside over other people's poverty, but very visibly not its own, for 32 years and counting, and it is determined to keep things that way. Hence its campaign against me, resulting in no sign of the 50 to 100 signatures, including household names, that would otherwise have appeared on this letter.
Fifthly, speaking of the Magic Money Tree, I am a firm proponent of its real name, Modern Monetary Theory, and increasingly, within and under that, of a Universal Basic Income of one thousand pounds per month. All income above that would be taxable, perhaps even at a flat rate with no further allowances or exemptions. The issuing of our own free-floating fiat currency, the understanding of the fact and implications of which is the solution to numerous economic problems and the alleged difficulties with which are fully addressed by MMT, is fundamental to the sovereignty that we must reassert over the Bank of England (New Labour's original sin having been the surrender of democratic political control over monetary policy), and which we must assert for the first time ever over the Corporation of the City of London, including by the restoration and enforcement of a Glass-Steagall type of strict statutory division between commercial banking and investment banking, and including by the simple closure of all tax havens under British jurisdiction, with the option of independence for anywhere that did not like it. I also support the Land Value Tax, which, like the Universal Basic Income, is very much an idea redolent of Theresa May, if she were only prepared to show the courage of her convictions, and to work across parties.
There have been seven recessions in the United Kingdom since the Second World War. Five of them have been under Conservative Governments. That party has also presided over all four separate periods of Quarter on Quarter fall in growth during the 2010s. By contrast, there was no recession on the day of the 2010 General Election. The Conservatives have more than doubled the National Debt. The Major Government also doubled the National Debt. Yet the Conservatives' undeserved reputation for economic competence endures. They are subjected to absolutely no scrutiny by the fake news detractors of their opponents, even when those opponents are endorsed by Nobel Laureates in Economics and by the IMF, something that Labour certainly never was when it was run by Corbyn's erstwhile Leadership rivals, nor would it have been under any of them.
Sixthly, then, as a determined opponent of the principle and consequences of the surrender of democratic political control over economic policy, as well as for many other reasons, I am a lifelong opponent of the European Union, and that on the grounds which did in fact deliver the vote to Leave. I want Brexit to be delivered in that interest, and not, as is currently being "negotiated", in the interests that did best out of the Treaty of Rome, the Single European Act and the Maastricht Treaty. That includes an extra £350 million per week for the NHS, which needs to be enshrined in primary legislation. Like the election of Donald Trump in the scandalously arranged absence of Bernie Sanders, the referendum result established the workers, and not the liberal bourgeoisie, as the key swing voters to whom tribute must be paid, so that identity issues must be located within the overarching and undergirding struggle for economic equality and for international peace.
In the struggle for the universal good that is economic equality, the leading role belongs to those who suffer most as a result of its absence, namely the working class. In the struggle for the universal good that is international peace, the leading role belongs to those who suffer most as a result of its absence, namely the working class and the youth. Apprentices and trainees deserve the same benefits as are enjoyed by their peers in further and higher education, and vice versa. The nature of education in general, and of higher education in particular, needs to be properly understood, so that we either fund higher education all the way up to doctoral level, or we charge fees at every stage. The training and other standards for the private sector to match must be set by national and municipal public ownership, itself reformed away from the Morrisonian model in the light of Trotskyist-influenced and Blue Labour critiques that are far more alike than the advocates of either would like to admit.
Seventhly, as something of a model of a different economy and of the opportunities for post-Brexit Britain, I have for some months, and despite the best efforts of the supposedly Labour County Council in trying to send me to prison instead, been working with everyone worth approaching on a proposal. Following the United Kingdom's withdrawal from the European Union, or in anticipation of that withdrawal, the Volkswagen Group would move to this historically industrial County of Durham all of its production for the British market that was not already located here in the United Kingdom, as I appreciate that a very small amount is.
The suggestion is for a company wholly owned by Volkswagen. One Director would be nominated by each of the Groups on Durham County Council other than the Labour Group, which is clearly unsympathetic to this project, and one Director would be nominated by those Councillors who had no formal political affiliation. A number of Directors equal to the number of non-Labour Groups would be nominated by Unite the Union, including one by Durham Unite Community. One Director would be nominated by the Durham Miners' Association. A Chairman appointed by Volkswagen would exercise the parent company's veto over all decisions. This new company would undertake to match (by such means as to avoid any conflict of interest) the Members' Initiative Fund of £2000 per annum at the disposal of each of the Councillors who were represented on its Board of Directors. It would underwrite the cost of the activities of Durham Unite Community. It would underwrite the Durham Miners' Gala. And it would underwrite the cost of maintaining the Durham Miners' Hall.
Were it not for Simon Henig and his ghastly little mob, then this would now be very well-advanced indeed. But they are determined to stop many thousands of well-paid, highly skilled jobs from coming to County Durham. They are determined to deny any kind of voice, both to all political positions other than their own, and to the trade union movement. They are determined to punish financially wards that have had the temerity to vote for anyone else. And they are determined to prevent a secure financial future for Durham Unite Community, for the Durham Miners' Gala, or for the Durham Miners' Hall. So determined are they, in fact, that they are engaged in a conspiracy to pervert the course of justice, and in malfeasance in public office, in an attempt to kill this scheme, among others, by sending me to prison. If I am wrong, then let Simon Henig sue me.
Eighthly, I have always argued that such highly paid, highly skilled, high status employment, which only the State can ever guarantee and which only the State can very often deliver, is the economic basis of the paternal authority, and thus of the paternal responsibility, that needs to be reasserted in relation to the key points of childhood and adolescence. All aspects of public policy must take account of this urgent social and cultural need. Not least, that includes energy policy: the energy sources to be preferred by the State are those providing the highly paid, highly skilled, high status jobs that secure the economic basis of paternal authority in the family and in the wider community. So, nuclear power. And coal, not dole.
Of course a new baby needs her mother. But a 15-year-old might very well need her father, and that bit of paternity leave that he had been owed for the preceding 15 years. Barely a generation ago, a single manual wage provided the wage-earner, his wife and their several children with a quality of life unimaginable even on two professional salaries today. This impoverishment has been so rapid and so extreme that most people, including almost all politicians and commentators, simply refuse to acknowledge that it has happened. But it has happened. And it is still going on.
If fathers matter, then they must face up to their responsibilities. With every assistance, including censure where necessary, from the wider society, including when society acts politically as the State. That entails a legal presumption of equal parenting. Restoration of the tax allowance for fathers for so long as Child Benefit was being paid to mothers. Restoration of the requirement that providers of fertility treatment take account of the child's need for a father. Repeal of the ludicrous provision for two women to be listed as a child's parents on a birth certificate, although even that is excelled by the provision for two men to be so listed. And paternity leave to be made available, up to a maximum over all the years in question, at any time until the child was 18 or left school.
Moreover, paternal authority cannot be affirmed while fathers are torn away from their children and harvested in wars. Especially, though not exclusively, since those sent to war tend to come from working-class backgrounds, where starting to have children often still happens earlier than has lately become the norm. Think of those very young men whom we see going off or coming home, hugging and kissing their tiny children. You can believe in fatherhood, or you can support wars under certainly most and possibly all circumstances, the latter especially in practice today even if not necessarily in the past or in principle. You cannot do both.
Any marrying couple should be entitled to register their marriage as bound by the law prior to 1969 with regard to grounds and procedures for divorce, and any religious organisation should be enabled to specify that any marriage that it conducted would be so bound, requiring it to counsel couples accordingly. Statute should specify that the Church of England and the Church in Wales each be such a body unless, respectively, the General Synod and the Governing Body specifically resolved the contrary by a two-thirds majority in all three Houses. There should be similar provision relating to the Methodist and United Reformed Churches, which also exist pursuant to Acts of Parliament, as well as by amendment to the legislation relating to the restoration of the Catholic hierarchy. Entitlement upon divorce should be fixed by Statute at one per cent of the other party's estate for each year of marriage, up to 50 per cent, with no entitlement for the petitioning party unless the other party's fault were proved.
There is a perfectly reasonable case for civil partnerships to be available to opposite-sex couples. It is not as if those couples would otherwise be getting married. Civil partnerships for opposite-sex couples would mean that no one would get married unless they very explicitly wanted to be married, in preference to a specific alternative. That could only strengthen marriage. For one thing, divorce could be made far more difficult, at least for people who had chosen marriage after this new arrangement had come into force. After all, if they had not wanted that, then they could always have had a civil partnership instead.
Unmarried opposite-sex partnerships are not some recent innovation. They are this country's historical norm. Most legal marriages used to last to the grave, if only because they could not be dissolved. But everyone who knows the first thing about the subject knows that between the Reformation and the late nineteenth century at the absolute earliest, relatively few people in Britain ever were legally married. They lived together, they had children, women often took men's names. But there was no marriage certificate, and it was quite normal to have several such arrangements over the course of a lifetime. When people sought the validation of the State (as much local as national) and of its Established Church, then they really did want that validation. And, of course, they could afford to obtain it.
The near-universality of marriage probably did not last 100 years, and it tellingly collapsed under Margaret Thatcher, when the economic order to which it was integral was dismantled. The introduction of opposite-sex civil partnerships would once again create the space in which the only people who got married were the people who really meant it. There might not be very many of those on these shores. But there almost, if almost, never have been. And never having needed to be consummated, civil partnerships ought not to be confined to unrelated couples. Am I trying to go back to the 1950s? To which features of the 1950s, exactly? Full employment? Public ownership? The Welfare State? Council housing? Municipal services? Apprenticeships? Free undergraduate tuition, once other, rather more pressing needs had been met? All of those things were bound up with things like this. That they have all been eroded or destroyed together has not been a coincidence. It is not called neoliberalism for nothing.
The first principle of neoliberalism is, of course, the "free" market. Like any economic arrangement, that is not a law of nature, but a political choice, and every political choice is a moral choice. There cannot be a "free" market in general but not in alcohol, tobacco, arms, drugs, prostitution or pornography. Therefore, there must not be a "free" market in general. We need a single category of illegal drug, with a crackdown on the possession of drugs, including a mandatory sentence of three months for a second offence, six months for a third offence, one year for a fourth offence, and so on. That most certainly does include cannabis, which is linked to violent psychosis, and any medicinal properties of which are no more applied by smoking a spliff than those of opium would be by injecting heroin, or than those of aspirin would be by ingesting bark.
It ought to be made a criminal offence for anyone aged 21 or over to buy or sell sex, with equal sentencing on both sides. No persecution of girls and very young women whose lives had already been so bad that they had become prostitutes. No witch-hunting of boys and very young men who were desperate to lose their virginities. But the treatment of women and men as moral, intellectual and legal equals.
The age of consent should effectively be raised to 18, by making it a criminal offence for anyone to commit any sexual act with or upon any person under that age who was more than two years younger than herself, or to incite any such person to commit any such act with or upon her or any third party anywhere in the world. The maximum sentence would be twice the difference in age, to the month where that was less than three years, or a life sentence where that difference was at least five years. No different rules for "positions of trust", which are being used against male, but not female, 18-year-olds looking after female, but not male, Sixth Formers visiting universities. And no provision, as at present, for boys to be prosecuted at any age, even if they are younger than the girls involved, whereas girls have to be 16.
The law on indecent images is also enforced in totally different ways in relation to boys and girls of the same age, and even to boys who are younger than the girls. That must end. Children under the age of consent can have abortion or contraception without parental permission. That is an argument for banning children under the age of consent from having abortion or contraception without parental permission. Unless they decided as adults to seek to make contact with their children, then the financial liability of male victims for pregnancies resulting from their sexual abuse ought also to be ruled out. Talk about victim-blaming.
The offences of rape, serious sexual assault, and sexual assault, ought to be replaced with aggravating circumstances to the general categories of offences against the person, enabling the sentences to be doubled. The sex of either party would be immaterial. There must be no anonymity either for adult defendants or for adult complainants. Either we have an open system of justice, or we do not. In this or any other area, there must be no suggestion of any reversal of the burden of proof. That reversal has largely been brought to you already, by the people who in the same year brought you the Iraq War. The Parliament that was supine before Tony Blair was also supine before Harriet Harman. Adults who made false allegations ought to be prosecuted automatically.
Moreover, how can anyone be convicted of non-consensual sex, who could not lawfully have engaged in consensual sex? If there is an age of consent, then anyone below it can be an assailant. But a sexual assailant? How? Similarly, if driving while intoxicated is a criminal offence, then how can intoxication, in itself, be a bar to sexual consent? The law needs to specify that it was, only to such an extent as would constitute a bar to driving. American-style legislation for internally administered "balance of probabilities" or "preponderance of evidence" tests to sexual assault allegations at universities or elsewhere must be banned by Statute. It is incompatible with the Rule of Law to punish someone for a criminal offence of which she has not been convicted. It must be made impossible for anyone to be extradited to face charges that fell short of these standards, or for such convictions to have any legal standing in this country.
Obscenity ought to be defined as material depicting acts that were themselves illegal, or which was reasonably likely to incite or encourage such acts. Sentencing would be the same as for the illegal act in question in each case. If the technology exists to require age verification for access to pornographic websites, then the technology exists to block those websites altogether.
My opposition to assisted suicide, not least as a disabled person, has been the clear majority view of the House of Commons for as long as this issue has presented itself in earnest. The composition of that House has changed drastically more than once during that period. Like John Smith, Charles Kennedy, George Galloway and Ronnie Campbell, I am totally opposed to abortion, as were previous parliamentary allies of Jeremy Corbyn's such as Mike Wood, Bob Wareing, Dennis Canavan and Bob Parry. Extremely few people in this country are of this view, but most of them are Labour voters and always will be. If such a stance is a bar to becoming Prime Minister, then Jesus told us to expect far worse than that, and, as ever, He has been as good as His word.
I support diverting funds from ethically problematic research on embryonic stem cells, which has never delivered anything, to ethically unproblematic research on adult and cord blood stem cells, which is delivering the goods in spite of criminal neglect. Science is what works. I have no objection to the treatment of gender dysphoria on the NHS, because it is an illness. There would be no case for treating anything on the NHS if it were not a diagnosed, and thus a diagnosable, medical condition.
For most of the present century, mine was a lone voice about the links between Harriet Harman and Patricia Hewitt on one side, and the Paedophile Information Exchange and Paedophile Action for Liberation on the other. I remain banned from several major websites for having pointed out these things long before the media pretended to have discovered them. That is my reply when people tell me to stop going on about the links between the 1980s Far Right, including Thomas Mair, and the people who are now running the country. They told me to stop going on about the links between Harriet Harman and Patricia Hewitt on the one hand, and the Paedophile Information Exchange and Paedophile Action for Liberation on the other.
Fleet Street-as-was had always, always known about that story. But I dared to mention it. So, among other things, I remain banned from several major websites. The official media finally said what they had always known when it became necessary to distract the public from the story of Patrick Rock, a story about which I also have no intention of shutting up. Just as I have no intention of shutting up about the links between the 1980s Far Right, including Thomas Mair, and the people who are now running the country. And just as I never did shut up about the links between Harriet Harman and Patricia Hewitt on the one hand, and the Paedophile Information Exchange and Paedophile Action for Liberation on the other. Each of those stories is a gateway into a vast, and partially overlapping, history of this country over the last 40 years and more. Both of those stories, both of those partially overlapping histories, are at play in the current abuse of the criminal justice system in order to persecute me. But I have been proved right once. I shall be proved right again.
Ninthly, on the subject of my having been proved right, I have opposed every actual or attempted erosion of civil liberties over the last 25 years, and, in the most intimate connection with that, I have opposed every British military intervention from Kosovo onwards. I am totally opposed to this country's poisonous relationship with Saudi Arabia, which equals only North Korea as one of the two most evil regimes on the planet, and even North Korea is not armed by Britain, nor does it drag Britain into wars, and nor has it had much success in spreading its ideology to Britain. Our membership of NATO commits us to the defence of the Islamist regime in Turkey, and of Baltic and other Eastern European types who downplay the numbers killed by Hitler while, at NATO's expense, glorifying those of their own compatriots who fought for him. There are other possible uses for two per cent of our GDP. We should just get out of NATO.
It entirely defeats me that torchlit neo-Nazi processions are objectionable in Virginia, as of course they are, but are positively laudable in Ukraine. Another attempted Far Right putsch assisted by the CIA, no more a popular uprising than anything else that is capable of staging a helicopter grenade attack on the Supreme Court, is being attempted in Venezuela. If there is one thing worth knowing about Venezuela, then it is that the people who are now beating the drum against it have been wrong about every foreign policy of the last 20 years, and that they had barely heard of the place, which they still could not find on a map, until they needed a stick with which to beat Jeremy Corbyn.
Had I the money, then I would bring an action before the High Court of Justiciary of Scotland, asking it to exercise its declaratory power against Tony Blair and his accomplices in relation to their crime of aggression against Iraq in 2003. At worst, the Court could say no. I continue to demand the Coroner's Inquest that has never been held into the death of Dr David Kelly, whose remains were recently exhumed and cremated in anticipation of a Corbyn Government. Why is there any other news than that? The supply of British arms to Saudi Arabia needs to be brought back to the floor of the House of Commons as a matter of the utmost urgency. The rather good Labour Chief Whip ought to publish in advance the list of MPs with leave of absence. For anyone else, abstention this time ought to mean deselection in due season, and universal moral revulsion with immediate effect. No such person ought to be re-elected. Therefore, no such person ought to be reselected.
It is not bleeding heart stuff to oppose the arms trade. It is good strategic sense. We never know where the arms might end up. Or, in the case of Saudi Arabia and its satrapies, we do know that the arms run a very high risk of ending up in the hands of the so-called Islamic State or of forces that are in no meaningful way distinguishable from it. BAE Systems ought to be renationalised as the monopoly supplier to our own Armed Forces, while all other sale of arms abroad ought to be banned. The State has a responsibility, not least to its own defence, to enable the diversification of the skilled work that is currently being done in the arms trade.
The same is true of Trident, the ever more eye-watering cost of which ought to be diverted to rebuilding the conventional Armed Forces (and not least the Royal Navy, which has gone to rack and ruin, having been the world's mightiest before nuclear weapons were ever thought of), to caring for veterans, to flood defences, and to the real nuclear deterrent, which is civil nuclear power. That, and the exploitation of Britain's vast reserves of coal, need to be the backbone of an "all-of-the-above" energy policy with its commanding heights in reformed public ownership, even while appreciating that if the shale gas is there at all, which unlike the coal we do not know, then it is in places that do not want or need fracking, unlike the coal that is very definitely in areas in dire need of mining, both as an industry and as a culture.
We need an approach to climate change which protects and extends secure employment with civilised wages and working conditions, which encourages economic development around the world, which upholds the right of the working classes and of non-white people to have children, which holds down and as far as practicable reduces the fuel prices that always hit the poor hardest, and which refuses to restrict travel opportunities or a full diet to the rich. Climate change is supposed to be anthropogenic. The human race makes the weather. The burning of carbon is the foundation of the working class, the foundation of the Left, the foundation of human progress (problematic though that term is), the foundation of civilisation.
We need a celebration of 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. The problem with the world is not that it has people in it. Which people, exactly? We all know the answer to that. Rather, people produce wealth, material and otherwise. People are wealth, material and otherwise.
The cheap call for flood defences to receive what is currently Overseas Aid money misses the point. The Statute Law should specify that the United Kingdom's aid to any given country be reduced by the exact cost of any space programme, or of any nuclear weapons programme, or of any nuclear submarine programme, or of any foreign aid budget of that country's own. The money thus saved would, however, have to remain within the budget of the Department for International Development, with the 0.7 per cent target still resolutely intact. For her having sought to arrange funding for an IS field hospital, Priti Patel ought to be prosecuted under anti-terrorism legislation.
Trident is not the only behemoth of profligacy in urgent need of reassessment. It is high time to expand London's airport capacity, but not in the form of a third runway at Heathrow when Gatwick offers a better alternative. That was one of George Galloway's key pledges when, in the face of a near-total media blackout, he stood for Mayor of London. Another was running Uber out of town, and it has been accepted that he was right all along about that. It is high time to revisit some more of them. It is high time to enforce the requirement, throughout the country, that 50 per cent of housing on all new projects must be dedicated to affordable housing, redefined as 50 per cent of average rents, not the 80 per cent that is currently the case. It is high time for an all-night Tube service, but with workers properly consulted on the process, properly recompensed, and not forced into working long, unsociable, and potentially dangerous hours.
It is high time to ban HGV vehicles from Central London during daytime hours, in a bid to reduce fuel emissions during those hours. It is high time to invest in more cycle lanes, and in initiatives to make it safer to cycle around London. It is high time for the use of the Oyster Card to be massively expanded, making it an interest free debit card used in shops and restaurants, for other services, and for the transfer of money abroad, so that City Hall would become a publicly owned People's Bank; again, this has national possibilities that demand to be explored. It is high time to put the £18 billion annual City Hall budget, and all other municipal budgets, online in real time, absolutely transparently, using the BlockChain technology developed by London's red hot FinTech industry that is currently based in the Shoreditch Corridor. And it is high time to end immediately all fire station closures, and all cuts to London's and everywhere else's fire services, reversing the cuts that have already been made. That would be a start, anyway. In fact, the start has been made, with the acceptance that George had been right all along about Uber.
As with the third runway at Heathrow, so with HS2. A fraction of the cost of that could reconnect many towns to a rail network that, in reformed public ownership, would provide the backbone of a rebuilt network of public transport, free at the point of use. This is a key issue for those of us who are disabled, and also for the rural working class, both of whom have suffered dreadfully at the hands of Durham County Council and its maniacal determination to cut our bus services. Like most local authorities, it is also hand in glove with those who would not want to see something else that I have long advocated, namely a statutory requirement of planning permission for change of use if it is proposed to turn a primary dwelling into a secondary dwelling, a working family home into a weekend or holiday home. Again, a voice for the rural working class.
And tenthly, there are all the other causes to which I am committed and which are guaranteed to annoy all the right people. Not only am I involved with the Dalits, the Rohingya (since long before they became famous, although I have had the privilege of knowing the great Jonah Fisher for 20 years) and the Chagossians, but I have even played a small part in bringing into being what is now the very considerable co-ordination of their efforts. I advocate the deportation of Altaf Hussain to Pakistan, and an inquiry into the role of the Thatcher Government in the 1984 storming of the Golden Temple and the events surrounding it. I have been almost a lone voice for the Dorje Shugden practitioners persecuted by the Dalai Lama, and for the Russian and other ethnic minorities oppressed in the Baltic States. I want to integrate these Islands and all of the British Overseas Territories into the Belt and Road Initiative.
I supported the Hillsborough campaign, of course, as I continue to support the campaigns for justice in relation to Orgreave, Wapping, Shrewsbury, Clay Cross, blacklisting, and so on. I supported Craig Murray in his recent trial for libel, and I support Neil Clark in his attempt to bring an action for stalking against Oliver Kamm, whose pawprints are all over my own persecution. I advocate the criminal investigation of the larcenous privatisation of the Royal Mail. With highly specialised Police in the field, I cannot see the point of MI5, and I tend to think that it ought to be disbanded. I have campaigned for years for national memorials, with annual wreath-laying ceremonies and so on, to the conscientious objectors during the First World War, to the ILP Contingent, and to the fallen of British Palestine. I would welcome the commemoration of the USS Liberty on that last, since those men's own country continues to treat their memory in a manner that is beneath contempt. I am actively seeking to secure the translation and publication of my friend Hernán Dobry's Operation Israel, which is the definitive account of the Israeli arming of Argentina during the Falklands War. That kind of thing makes one enemies of whom one can be justly proud.
And then there are all my little heresies even within the Left. I have never been any kind of Marxist. Until the infamous abstention on the Welfare Bill, I advocated only a second preference vote for Jeremy Corbyn, with a first preference vote for Andy Burnham. I always supported Tom Watson for Deputy Leader, and I still do; when Angela Rayner becomes Leader, then the balance that Jeremy and Tom provide each other would most obviously be provided by Angela and by my old university drinking companion, Jonathan Ashworth. I am not a member of Momentum, although I do advocate joining it, along with the Labour Party and the Co-operative Party. I am a member of the Fabian Society, and I was recently a candidate, albeit an unsuccessful one, for its Executive Committee. Progress still sends me its magazine, so I must still be on its books somehow. I have had links to Blue Labour for as long as it has existed, to such an extent that John Milbank wrote the preface to my first book, while he and Maurice Glasman wrote commendations of my second. I regret that its Nottingham conferences are no longer held.
I accept that the monarchy keeps sweet a lot of people who need to be kept sweet, even if I am increasingly at a loss as to why it does. I accept all of the arguments against commercial schools, but I do not see the schools of the right-wing Labour municipal machines giving the leading figures of the Left the platforms that the major public schools, at least, extend to them on a very regular basis. I still have a broadly Unionist heart in relation to Northern Ireland, in that nothing like post-War British social democracy, and not least the NHS, has ever existed in the Irish Republic, or, I strongly suspect, ever will. But that one is rapidly approaching its own conclusion, quite inexorably.
Although I am not in any ideological sense a Zionist, and although I am extremely critical of the present Israeli Government, I am wholly resigned to the simple existence of the State of Israel, dating as it does from the same year as the Empire Windrush, and I am only a qualified supporter of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, in that academic and cultural boycotts strike me as contrary to the nature of scholarship, art and science, while sporting boycotts seem cruel to very young people whose chance to compete at a certain level may come only once or twice in a lifetime.
And I contend that as the proprietor of the whole of Sky, Rupert Murdoch might do some good. There are positions that the BBC simply ignores. The workers, and not the liberal bourgeoisie, as the key swing voters. Identity issues located within the struggle for economic equality and for international peace. The leading role in the defence of universal public services of those who would otherwise lack basic amenities, and in the promotion of peace of those who would be the first to be called upon to die in wars. The decision of the EU referendum by areas that voted Labour, Liberal Democrat or Plaid Cymru. Opposition from the start to the failed programme of economic austerity.
Against all Governments since 1997, opposition to the privatisation of the NHS and other public services, to the persecution of the disabled, to the assault on civil liberties, to every British military intervention during that period, to Britain's immoral and one-sided relationship with Saudi Arabia, and to the demonisation of Russia. Rejection of any approach to climate change which would threaten jobs, workers' rights, the right to have children, travel opportunities, or universal access to a full diet. Rescue of issues such as male suicide, men's health, and fathers' rights from those whose economic and other policies have caused the problems. And refusal to recognise racists, Fascists or opportunists as the authentic voices of the accepted need to control immigration. Murdoch ought to identify and include representatives of the traditions that those and other marginalised views express in practice.
All in all, more than enough reason to want me out of circulation.
It needs, however, to draw on a very wide range of traditions and insights. My new magazine, The Weekly Standard, will do that from as early as possible next year, for all the efforts to obstruct it, and thus to deny the voices of Jeremy Corbyn, George Galloway and others across the spectrum, to readers with an interest in football, or pop music, or popular television, all of which we shall be covering just as seriously. I agree on many things with Peter Hitchens, and on quite a few with Peter Oborne. I have been published, even for payment, in The American Conservative, and I have close links to the paleoconservatives, including to one of their rising stars over here, who is one of my two strongest local supporters, both of whom will be writing for the Standard. As will my other brace of protégés, who are even more youthful again, . One of them has lately gone from Momentum to AltRight to whatever comes after that, but I shall bring him round in due season. We were all young once.
This year was the first time since the introduction of unitary local government that, being unable to vote Labour because of the Teaching Assistants, I did not vote both for a Labour and for an Independent candidate for the County Council. Heartbreakingly, it was also the first time that I ever declined an opportunity to vote for Ossie Johnson for anything, having given him my first ever vote, at a District Council by-election while I was still in the Upper Sixth and uniformed accordingly, and having voted for him whenever the occasion presented itself during the intervening 21 years, which is more than half my lifetime. I experienced a physical pain at being unable to vote for Ossie this time.
Even when I chaired the Labour Party in Lanchester, it thankfully never put up a full slate of Parish Council candidates, so I have never voted exclusively for those of one persuasion. This year, I voted, as I have always done, for 15 candidates to fill the 15 seats on the Lanchester Parish Council on which I myself served for many years. 12 of those candidates were elected. Among those 12 were, and are, Labour, Independent, Conservative and Liberal Democrat representatives. No one on that Council would have been elected on the votes of people who had voted only Labour, or only Independent, or only Conservative, or only Liberal Democrat. Such ballot papers were submitted, but I was at the count, and I can assure you that there were not enough of them to have elected anyone. Everyone who was elected ought to keep that in mind.
At the four European Elections of my adult lifetime, I have voted Socialist Labour, Respect, No2EU, and Labour. At General Elections, I voted Labour in 1997, for which no one of my generation will ever apologise; if you did not grow up under the Major "Government", then you cannot possibly understand. I voted Labour through gritted teeth in 2001, for a local Independent who did strikingly well in 2005, for him again in 2010 in protest at the imposition of all-women shortlist on the Constituency Labour Party here, and proudly for Pat Glass and Ed Miliband in 2015. I would have voted for Pat again. As it is, I shall never forgive the Labour Party in County Durham for having deprived me, by its treatment of the Teaching Assistants, of the opportunity to participate in the Great Corbyn Surge of 2017. But Grahame Morris was the only County Durham MP to be seeking re-election and to have earned the votes of the TAs' supporters. The Labour candidate here had walked out of their Solidarity Rally a few weeks before.
Instead, therefore, I voted for Owen Temple, the Liberal Democrat who, as a County Councillor, was and is one of the two most stalwart supporters of the TAs. The other was and is his Independent wardmate, Alex Watson, who is, with George Galloway, one of my Campaign Patrons. I was closely associated with Alex's former Labour Leadership of the former Derwentside District Council, which was conducted, highly successfully, in partnership with the Independents against the Labour faction that now controls the unitary County Council. Had Alex or one of his senior allies been willing to break with Labour in 2010, then he would have been the First Past the Post for this parliamentary seat, including with my vote.
I intend to vote Labour at the next General Election, come what may. In relation to my MP, Laura Pidcock, I am the Leader of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition. I wish her well, but Labour holds fewer than half the County Council seats here, Laura's own office is in Owen's and Alex's non-Labour ward where Jeremy Corbyn was last week shown visiting Greggs, and the Conservatives took 34 per cent of the vote in this constituency even with a candidate whose address on the ballot paper was in Sussex. It really will not do to describe more than one third of one's constituents in terms reminiscent of Margaret Thatcher's description of the miners. Laura is very young, she is from outside the area, and it shows. But there is time yet, and she is here now, living in Lanchester. The circumstances of her imposition will always rankle with those of my own or a similar age who retained their Labour Party membership cards, but that is not my concern. I have always been fairly crossparty and nonparty, and I have now been nothing else for longer than I was ever in the Labour Party.
In that spirit, fourthly, while I am the first to say that Corbyn ought to be Prime Minister instead of Theresa May, I firmly contend that she was the only Conservative Leader who could have prevented him from winning an overall majority this year, I hugely admire her world-leading work against human trafficking and modern slavery, and I wish that she would get on with implementing her original agenda of workers' and consumers' representation in corporate governance, of shareholders' control over executive pay, of restrictions on pay differentials within companies, of an investment-based Industrial Strategy and infrastructure programme, of greatly increased housebuilding, of action against tax avoidance, of a ban on public contracts for tax-avoiding companies (including, Your Majesty, "The Firm", with its public contract to provide a Head of State), of a cap on energy prices, of banning or greatly restricting foreign takeovers, of a ban on unpaid internships, and of an inquiry into Orgreave. The parliamentary majorities for all of these are in existence. The Prime Minister just needs to look beyond her own party.
As, in view of the fact that there is a hung Parliament, she ought to be doing, anyway. In the words of a letter that I wrote in August, and which was sent over several signatures to several newspapers, "We warmly welcome the billion pound investment in jobs and services in Northern Ireland. We call for Scotland, Wales, and each of the nine English regions to receive the same per capita. Anything less would make a mockery of the very names of the Conservative and Unionist Party, and of the Democratic Unionist Party. The DUP has never disputed the existence of the so-called Magic Money Tree. At least in practice, that existence is now fully acknowledged by the Conservative Party as well. Let the abundant fruits of that Tree be harvested throughout the United Kingdom." It might have done better if it had been sent over the scores of signatures from academic economists, trade union leaders, commentators and activists that it would have borne if not for the ongoing campaign against me by the nominally Labour Leadership of Durham County Council. That Leadership, of course, has done nothing but preside over other people's poverty, but very visibly not its own, for 32 years and counting, and it is determined to keep things that way. Hence its campaign against me, resulting in no sign of the 50 to 100 signatures, including household names, that would otherwise have appeared on this letter.
Fifthly, speaking of the Magic Money Tree, I am a firm proponent of its real name, Modern Monetary Theory, and increasingly, within and under that, of a Universal Basic Income of one thousand pounds per month. All income above that would be taxable, perhaps even at a flat rate with no further allowances or exemptions. The issuing of our own free-floating fiat currency, the understanding of the fact and implications of which is the solution to numerous economic problems and the alleged difficulties with which are fully addressed by MMT, is fundamental to the sovereignty that we must reassert over the Bank of England (New Labour's original sin having been the surrender of democratic political control over monetary policy), and which we must assert for the first time ever over the Corporation of the City of London, including by the restoration and enforcement of a Glass-Steagall type of strict statutory division between commercial banking and investment banking, and including by the simple closure of all tax havens under British jurisdiction, with the option of independence for anywhere that did not like it. I also support the Land Value Tax, which, like the Universal Basic Income, is very much an idea redolent of Theresa May, if she were only prepared to show the courage of her convictions, and to work across parties.
There have been seven recessions in the United Kingdom since the Second World War. Five of them have been under Conservative Governments. That party has also presided over all four separate periods of Quarter on Quarter fall in growth during the 2010s. By contrast, there was no recession on the day of the 2010 General Election. The Conservatives have more than doubled the National Debt. The Major Government also doubled the National Debt. Yet the Conservatives' undeserved reputation for economic competence endures. They are subjected to absolutely no scrutiny by the fake news detractors of their opponents, even when those opponents are endorsed by Nobel Laureates in Economics and by the IMF, something that Labour certainly never was when it was run by Corbyn's erstwhile Leadership rivals, nor would it have been under any of them.
Sixthly, then, as a determined opponent of the principle and consequences of the surrender of democratic political control over economic policy, as well as for many other reasons, I am a lifelong opponent of the European Union, and that on the grounds which did in fact deliver the vote to Leave. I want Brexit to be delivered in that interest, and not, as is currently being "negotiated", in the interests that did best out of the Treaty of Rome, the Single European Act and the Maastricht Treaty. That includes an extra £350 million per week for the NHS, which needs to be enshrined in primary legislation. Like the election of Donald Trump in the scandalously arranged absence of Bernie Sanders, the referendum result established the workers, and not the liberal bourgeoisie, as the key swing voters to whom tribute must be paid, so that identity issues must be located within the overarching and undergirding struggle for economic equality and for international peace.
In the struggle for the universal good that is economic equality, the leading role belongs to those who suffer most as a result of its absence, namely the working class. In the struggle for the universal good that is international peace, the leading role belongs to those who suffer most as a result of its absence, namely the working class and the youth. Apprentices and trainees deserve the same benefits as are enjoyed by their peers in further and higher education, and vice versa. The nature of education in general, and of higher education in particular, needs to be properly understood, so that we either fund higher education all the way up to doctoral level, or we charge fees at every stage. The training and other standards for the private sector to match must be set by national and municipal public ownership, itself reformed away from the Morrisonian model in the light of Trotskyist-influenced and Blue Labour critiques that are far more alike than the advocates of either would like to admit.
Seventhly, as something of a model of a different economy and of the opportunities for post-Brexit Britain, I have for some months, and despite the best efforts of the supposedly Labour County Council in trying to send me to prison instead, been working with everyone worth approaching on a proposal. Following the United Kingdom's withdrawal from the European Union, or in anticipation of that withdrawal, the Volkswagen Group would move to this historically industrial County of Durham all of its production for the British market that was not already located here in the United Kingdom, as I appreciate that a very small amount is.
The suggestion is for a company wholly owned by Volkswagen. One Director would be nominated by each of the Groups on Durham County Council other than the Labour Group, which is clearly unsympathetic to this project, and one Director would be nominated by those Councillors who had no formal political affiliation. A number of Directors equal to the number of non-Labour Groups would be nominated by Unite the Union, including one by Durham Unite Community. One Director would be nominated by the Durham Miners' Association. A Chairman appointed by Volkswagen would exercise the parent company's veto over all decisions. This new company would undertake to match (by such means as to avoid any conflict of interest) the Members' Initiative Fund of £2000 per annum at the disposal of each of the Councillors who were represented on its Board of Directors. It would underwrite the cost of the activities of Durham Unite Community. It would underwrite the Durham Miners' Gala. And it would underwrite the cost of maintaining the Durham Miners' Hall.
Were it not for Simon Henig and his ghastly little mob, then this would now be very well-advanced indeed. But they are determined to stop many thousands of well-paid, highly skilled jobs from coming to County Durham. They are determined to deny any kind of voice, both to all political positions other than their own, and to the trade union movement. They are determined to punish financially wards that have had the temerity to vote for anyone else. And they are determined to prevent a secure financial future for Durham Unite Community, for the Durham Miners' Gala, or for the Durham Miners' Hall. So determined are they, in fact, that they are engaged in a conspiracy to pervert the course of justice, and in malfeasance in public office, in an attempt to kill this scheme, among others, by sending me to prison. If I am wrong, then let Simon Henig sue me.
Eighthly, I have always argued that such highly paid, highly skilled, high status employment, which only the State can ever guarantee and which only the State can very often deliver, is the economic basis of the paternal authority, and thus of the paternal responsibility, that needs to be reasserted in relation to the key points of childhood and adolescence. All aspects of public policy must take account of this urgent social and cultural need. Not least, that includes energy policy: the energy sources to be preferred by the State are those providing the highly paid, highly skilled, high status jobs that secure the economic basis of paternal authority in the family and in the wider community. So, nuclear power. And coal, not dole.
Of course a new baby needs her mother. But a 15-year-old might very well need her father, and that bit of paternity leave that he had been owed for the preceding 15 years. Barely a generation ago, a single manual wage provided the wage-earner, his wife and their several children with a quality of life unimaginable even on two professional salaries today. This impoverishment has been so rapid and so extreme that most people, including almost all politicians and commentators, simply refuse to acknowledge that it has happened. But it has happened. And it is still going on.
If fathers matter, then they must face up to their responsibilities. With every assistance, including censure where necessary, from the wider society, including when society acts politically as the State. That entails a legal presumption of equal parenting. Restoration of the tax allowance for fathers for so long as Child Benefit was being paid to mothers. Restoration of the requirement that providers of fertility treatment take account of the child's need for a father. Repeal of the ludicrous provision for two women to be listed as a child's parents on a birth certificate, although even that is excelled by the provision for two men to be so listed. And paternity leave to be made available, up to a maximum over all the years in question, at any time until the child was 18 or left school.
Moreover, paternal authority cannot be affirmed while fathers are torn away from their children and harvested in wars. Especially, though not exclusively, since those sent to war tend to come from working-class backgrounds, where starting to have children often still happens earlier than has lately become the norm. Think of those very young men whom we see going off or coming home, hugging and kissing their tiny children. You can believe in fatherhood, or you can support wars under certainly most and possibly all circumstances, the latter especially in practice today even if not necessarily in the past or in principle. You cannot do both.
Any marrying couple should be entitled to register their marriage as bound by the law prior to 1969 with regard to grounds and procedures for divorce, and any religious organisation should be enabled to specify that any marriage that it conducted would be so bound, requiring it to counsel couples accordingly. Statute should specify that the Church of England and the Church in Wales each be such a body unless, respectively, the General Synod and the Governing Body specifically resolved the contrary by a two-thirds majority in all three Houses. There should be similar provision relating to the Methodist and United Reformed Churches, which also exist pursuant to Acts of Parliament, as well as by amendment to the legislation relating to the restoration of the Catholic hierarchy. Entitlement upon divorce should be fixed by Statute at one per cent of the other party's estate for each year of marriage, up to 50 per cent, with no entitlement for the petitioning party unless the other party's fault were proved.
There is a perfectly reasonable case for civil partnerships to be available to opposite-sex couples. It is not as if those couples would otherwise be getting married. Civil partnerships for opposite-sex couples would mean that no one would get married unless they very explicitly wanted to be married, in preference to a specific alternative. That could only strengthen marriage. For one thing, divorce could be made far more difficult, at least for people who had chosen marriage after this new arrangement had come into force. After all, if they had not wanted that, then they could always have had a civil partnership instead.
Unmarried opposite-sex partnerships are not some recent innovation. They are this country's historical norm. Most legal marriages used to last to the grave, if only because they could not be dissolved. But everyone who knows the first thing about the subject knows that between the Reformation and the late nineteenth century at the absolute earliest, relatively few people in Britain ever were legally married. They lived together, they had children, women often took men's names. But there was no marriage certificate, and it was quite normal to have several such arrangements over the course of a lifetime. When people sought the validation of the State (as much local as national) and of its Established Church, then they really did want that validation. And, of course, they could afford to obtain it.
The near-universality of marriage probably did not last 100 years, and it tellingly collapsed under Margaret Thatcher, when the economic order to which it was integral was dismantled. The introduction of opposite-sex civil partnerships would once again create the space in which the only people who got married were the people who really meant it. There might not be very many of those on these shores. But there almost, if almost, never have been. And never having needed to be consummated, civil partnerships ought not to be confined to unrelated couples. Am I trying to go back to the 1950s? To which features of the 1950s, exactly? Full employment? Public ownership? The Welfare State? Council housing? Municipal services? Apprenticeships? Free undergraduate tuition, once other, rather more pressing needs had been met? All of those things were bound up with things like this. That they have all been eroded or destroyed together has not been a coincidence. It is not called neoliberalism for nothing.
The first principle of neoliberalism is, of course, the "free" market. Like any economic arrangement, that is not a law of nature, but a political choice, and every political choice is a moral choice. There cannot be a "free" market in general but not in alcohol, tobacco, arms, drugs, prostitution or pornography. Therefore, there must not be a "free" market in general. We need a single category of illegal drug, with a crackdown on the possession of drugs, including a mandatory sentence of three months for a second offence, six months for a third offence, one year for a fourth offence, and so on. That most certainly does include cannabis, which is linked to violent psychosis, and any medicinal properties of which are no more applied by smoking a spliff than those of opium would be by injecting heroin, or than those of aspirin would be by ingesting bark.
It ought to be made a criminal offence for anyone aged 21 or over to buy or sell sex, with equal sentencing on both sides. No persecution of girls and very young women whose lives had already been so bad that they had become prostitutes. No witch-hunting of boys and very young men who were desperate to lose their virginities. But the treatment of women and men as moral, intellectual and legal equals.
The age of consent should effectively be raised to 18, by making it a criminal offence for anyone to commit any sexual act with or upon any person under that age who was more than two years younger than herself, or to incite any such person to commit any such act with or upon her or any third party anywhere in the world. The maximum sentence would be twice the difference in age, to the month where that was less than three years, or a life sentence where that difference was at least five years. No different rules for "positions of trust", which are being used against male, but not female, 18-year-olds looking after female, but not male, Sixth Formers visiting universities. And no provision, as at present, for boys to be prosecuted at any age, even if they are younger than the girls involved, whereas girls have to be 16.
The law on indecent images is also enforced in totally different ways in relation to boys and girls of the same age, and even to boys who are younger than the girls. That must end. Children under the age of consent can have abortion or contraception without parental permission. That is an argument for banning children under the age of consent from having abortion or contraception without parental permission. Unless they decided as adults to seek to make contact with their children, then the financial liability of male victims for pregnancies resulting from their sexual abuse ought also to be ruled out. Talk about victim-blaming.
The offences of rape, serious sexual assault, and sexual assault, ought to be replaced with aggravating circumstances to the general categories of offences against the person, enabling the sentences to be doubled. The sex of either party would be immaterial. There must be no anonymity either for adult defendants or for adult complainants. Either we have an open system of justice, or we do not. In this or any other area, there must be no suggestion of any reversal of the burden of proof. That reversal has largely been brought to you already, by the people who in the same year brought you the Iraq War. The Parliament that was supine before Tony Blair was also supine before Harriet Harman. Adults who made false allegations ought to be prosecuted automatically.
Moreover, how can anyone be convicted of non-consensual sex, who could not lawfully have engaged in consensual sex? If there is an age of consent, then anyone below it can be an assailant. But a sexual assailant? How? Similarly, if driving while intoxicated is a criminal offence, then how can intoxication, in itself, be a bar to sexual consent? The law needs to specify that it was, only to such an extent as would constitute a bar to driving. American-style legislation for internally administered "balance of probabilities" or "preponderance of evidence" tests to sexual assault allegations at universities or elsewhere must be banned by Statute. It is incompatible with the Rule of Law to punish someone for a criminal offence of which she has not been convicted. It must be made impossible for anyone to be extradited to face charges that fell short of these standards, or for such convictions to have any legal standing in this country.
Obscenity ought to be defined as material depicting acts that were themselves illegal, or which was reasonably likely to incite or encourage such acts. Sentencing would be the same as for the illegal act in question in each case. If the technology exists to require age verification for access to pornographic websites, then the technology exists to block those websites altogether.
My opposition to assisted suicide, not least as a disabled person, has been the clear majority view of the House of Commons for as long as this issue has presented itself in earnest. The composition of that House has changed drastically more than once during that period. Like John Smith, Charles Kennedy, George Galloway and Ronnie Campbell, I am totally opposed to abortion, as were previous parliamentary allies of Jeremy Corbyn's such as Mike Wood, Bob Wareing, Dennis Canavan and Bob Parry. Extremely few people in this country are of this view, but most of them are Labour voters and always will be. If such a stance is a bar to becoming Prime Minister, then Jesus told us to expect far worse than that, and, as ever, He has been as good as His word.
I support diverting funds from ethically problematic research on embryonic stem cells, which has never delivered anything, to ethically unproblematic research on adult and cord blood stem cells, which is delivering the goods in spite of criminal neglect. Science is what works. I have no objection to the treatment of gender dysphoria on the NHS, because it is an illness. There would be no case for treating anything on the NHS if it were not a diagnosed, and thus a diagnosable, medical condition.
For most of the present century, mine was a lone voice about the links between Harriet Harman and Patricia Hewitt on one side, and the Paedophile Information Exchange and Paedophile Action for Liberation on the other. I remain banned from several major websites for having pointed out these things long before the media pretended to have discovered them. That is my reply when people tell me to stop going on about the links between the 1980s Far Right, including Thomas Mair, and the people who are now running the country. They told me to stop going on about the links between Harriet Harman and Patricia Hewitt on the one hand, and the Paedophile Information Exchange and Paedophile Action for Liberation on the other.
Fleet Street-as-was had always, always known about that story. But I dared to mention it. So, among other things, I remain banned from several major websites. The official media finally said what they had always known when it became necessary to distract the public from the story of Patrick Rock, a story about which I also have no intention of shutting up. Just as I have no intention of shutting up about the links between the 1980s Far Right, including Thomas Mair, and the people who are now running the country. And just as I never did shut up about the links between Harriet Harman and Patricia Hewitt on the one hand, and the Paedophile Information Exchange and Paedophile Action for Liberation on the other. Each of those stories is a gateway into a vast, and partially overlapping, history of this country over the last 40 years and more. Both of those stories, both of those partially overlapping histories, are at play in the current abuse of the criminal justice system in order to persecute me. But I have been proved right once. I shall be proved right again.
Ninthly, on the subject of my having been proved right, I have opposed every actual or attempted erosion of civil liberties over the last 25 years, and, in the most intimate connection with that, I have opposed every British military intervention from Kosovo onwards. I am totally opposed to this country's poisonous relationship with Saudi Arabia, which equals only North Korea as one of the two most evil regimes on the planet, and even North Korea is not armed by Britain, nor does it drag Britain into wars, and nor has it had much success in spreading its ideology to Britain. Our membership of NATO commits us to the defence of the Islamist regime in Turkey, and of Baltic and other Eastern European types who downplay the numbers killed by Hitler while, at NATO's expense, glorifying those of their own compatriots who fought for him. There are other possible uses for two per cent of our GDP. We should just get out of NATO.
It entirely defeats me that torchlit neo-Nazi processions are objectionable in Virginia, as of course they are, but are positively laudable in Ukraine. Another attempted Far Right putsch assisted by the CIA, no more a popular uprising than anything else that is capable of staging a helicopter grenade attack on the Supreme Court, is being attempted in Venezuela. If there is one thing worth knowing about Venezuela, then it is that the people who are now beating the drum against it have been wrong about every foreign policy of the last 20 years, and that they had barely heard of the place, which they still could not find on a map, until they needed a stick with which to beat Jeremy Corbyn.
Had I the money, then I would bring an action before the High Court of Justiciary of Scotland, asking it to exercise its declaratory power against Tony Blair and his accomplices in relation to their crime of aggression against Iraq in 2003. At worst, the Court could say no. I continue to demand the Coroner's Inquest that has never been held into the death of Dr David Kelly, whose remains were recently exhumed and cremated in anticipation of a Corbyn Government. Why is there any other news than that? The supply of British arms to Saudi Arabia needs to be brought back to the floor of the House of Commons as a matter of the utmost urgency. The rather good Labour Chief Whip ought to publish in advance the list of MPs with leave of absence. For anyone else, abstention this time ought to mean deselection in due season, and universal moral revulsion with immediate effect. No such person ought to be re-elected. Therefore, no such person ought to be reselected.
It is not bleeding heart stuff to oppose the arms trade. It is good strategic sense. We never know where the arms might end up. Or, in the case of Saudi Arabia and its satrapies, we do know that the arms run a very high risk of ending up in the hands of the so-called Islamic State or of forces that are in no meaningful way distinguishable from it. BAE Systems ought to be renationalised as the monopoly supplier to our own Armed Forces, while all other sale of arms abroad ought to be banned. The State has a responsibility, not least to its own defence, to enable the diversification of the skilled work that is currently being done in the arms trade.
The same is true of Trident, the ever more eye-watering cost of which ought to be diverted to rebuilding the conventional Armed Forces (and not least the Royal Navy, which has gone to rack and ruin, having been the world's mightiest before nuclear weapons were ever thought of), to caring for veterans, to flood defences, and to the real nuclear deterrent, which is civil nuclear power. That, and the exploitation of Britain's vast reserves of coal, need to be the backbone of an "all-of-the-above" energy policy with its commanding heights in reformed public ownership, even while appreciating that if the shale gas is there at all, which unlike the coal we do not know, then it is in places that do not want or need fracking, unlike the coal that is very definitely in areas in dire need of mining, both as an industry and as a culture.
We need an approach to climate change which protects and extends secure employment with civilised wages and working conditions, which encourages economic development around the world, which upholds the right of the working classes and of non-white people to have children, which holds down and as far as practicable reduces the fuel prices that always hit the poor hardest, and which refuses to restrict travel opportunities or a full diet to the rich. Climate change is supposed to be anthropogenic. The human race makes the weather. The burning of carbon is the foundation of the working class, the foundation of the Left, the foundation of human progress (problematic though that term is), the foundation of civilisation.
We need a celebration of 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. The problem with the world is not that it has people in it. Which people, exactly? We all know the answer to that. Rather, people produce wealth, material and otherwise. People are wealth, material and otherwise.
The cheap call for flood defences to receive what is currently Overseas Aid money misses the point. The Statute Law should specify that the United Kingdom's aid to any given country be reduced by the exact cost of any space programme, or of any nuclear weapons programme, or of any nuclear submarine programme, or of any foreign aid budget of that country's own. The money thus saved would, however, have to remain within the budget of the Department for International Development, with the 0.7 per cent target still resolutely intact. For her having sought to arrange funding for an IS field hospital, Priti Patel ought to be prosecuted under anti-terrorism legislation.
Trident is not the only behemoth of profligacy in urgent need of reassessment. It is high time to expand London's airport capacity, but not in the form of a third runway at Heathrow when Gatwick offers a better alternative. That was one of George Galloway's key pledges when, in the face of a near-total media blackout, he stood for Mayor of London. Another was running Uber out of town, and it has been accepted that he was right all along about that. It is high time to revisit some more of them. It is high time to enforce the requirement, throughout the country, that 50 per cent of housing on all new projects must be dedicated to affordable housing, redefined as 50 per cent of average rents, not the 80 per cent that is currently the case. It is high time for an all-night Tube service, but with workers properly consulted on the process, properly recompensed, and not forced into working long, unsociable, and potentially dangerous hours.
It is high time to ban HGV vehicles from Central London during daytime hours, in a bid to reduce fuel emissions during those hours. It is high time to invest in more cycle lanes, and in initiatives to make it safer to cycle around London. It is high time for the use of the Oyster Card to be massively expanded, making it an interest free debit card used in shops and restaurants, for other services, and for the transfer of money abroad, so that City Hall would become a publicly owned People's Bank; again, this has national possibilities that demand to be explored. It is high time to put the £18 billion annual City Hall budget, and all other municipal budgets, online in real time, absolutely transparently, using the BlockChain technology developed by London's red hot FinTech industry that is currently based in the Shoreditch Corridor. And it is high time to end immediately all fire station closures, and all cuts to London's and everywhere else's fire services, reversing the cuts that have already been made. That would be a start, anyway. In fact, the start has been made, with the acceptance that George had been right all along about Uber.
As with the third runway at Heathrow, so with HS2. A fraction of the cost of that could reconnect many towns to a rail network that, in reformed public ownership, would provide the backbone of a rebuilt network of public transport, free at the point of use. This is a key issue for those of us who are disabled, and also for the rural working class, both of whom have suffered dreadfully at the hands of Durham County Council and its maniacal determination to cut our bus services. Like most local authorities, it is also hand in glove with those who would not want to see something else that I have long advocated, namely a statutory requirement of planning permission for change of use if it is proposed to turn a primary dwelling into a secondary dwelling, a working family home into a weekend or holiday home. Again, a voice for the rural working class.
And tenthly, there are all the other causes to which I am committed and which are guaranteed to annoy all the right people. Not only am I involved with the Dalits, the Rohingya (since long before they became famous, although I have had the privilege of knowing the great Jonah Fisher for 20 years) and the Chagossians, but I have even played a small part in bringing into being what is now the very considerable co-ordination of their efforts. I advocate the deportation of Altaf Hussain to Pakistan, and an inquiry into the role of the Thatcher Government in the 1984 storming of the Golden Temple and the events surrounding it. I have been almost a lone voice for the Dorje Shugden practitioners persecuted by the Dalai Lama, and for the Russian and other ethnic minorities oppressed in the Baltic States. I want to integrate these Islands and all of the British Overseas Territories into the Belt and Road Initiative.
I supported the Hillsborough campaign, of course, as I continue to support the campaigns for justice in relation to Orgreave, Wapping, Shrewsbury, Clay Cross, blacklisting, and so on. I supported Craig Murray in his recent trial for libel, and I support Neil Clark in his attempt to bring an action for stalking against Oliver Kamm, whose pawprints are all over my own persecution. I advocate the criminal investigation of the larcenous privatisation of the Royal Mail. With highly specialised Police in the field, I cannot see the point of MI5, and I tend to think that it ought to be disbanded. I have campaigned for years for national memorials, with annual wreath-laying ceremonies and so on, to the conscientious objectors during the First World War, to the ILP Contingent, and to the fallen of British Palestine. I would welcome the commemoration of the USS Liberty on that last, since those men's own country continues to treat their memory in a manner that is beneath contempt. I am actively seeking to secure the translation and publication of my friend Hernán Dobry's Operation Israel, which is the definitive account of the Israeli arming of Argentina during the Falklands War. That kind of thing makes one enemies of whom one can be justly proud.
And then there are all my little heresies even within the Left. I have never been any kind of Marxist. Until the infamous abstention on the Welfare Bill, I advocated only a second preference vote for Jeremy Corbyn, with a first preference vote for Andy Burnham. I always supported Tom Watson for Deputy Leader, and I still do; when Angela Rayner becomes Leader, then the balance that Jeremy and Tom provide each other would most obviously be provided by Angela and by my old university drinking companion, Jonathan Ashworth. I am not a member of Momentum, although I do advocate joining it, along with the Labour Party and the Co-operative Party. I am a member of the Fabian Society, and I was recently a candidate, albeit an unsuccessful one, for its Executive Committee. Progress still sends me its magazine, so I must still be on its books somehow. I have had links to Blue Labour for as long as it has existed, to such an extent that John Milbank wrote the preface to my first book, while he and Maurice Glasman wrote commendations of my second. I regret that its Nottingham conferences are no longer held.
I accept that the monarchy keeps sweet a lot of people who need to be kept sweet, even if I am increasingly at a loss as to why it does. I accept all of the arguments against commercial schools, but I do not see the schools of the right-wing Labour municipal machines giving the leading figures of the Left the platforms that the major public schools, at least, extend to them on a very regular basis. I still have a broadly Unionist heart in relation to Northern Ireland, in that nothing like post-War British social democracy, and not least the NHS, has ever existed in the Irish Republic, or, I strongly suspect, ever will. But that one is rapidly approaching its own conclusion, quite inexorably.
Although I am not in any ideological sense a Zionist, and although I am extremely critical of the present Israeli Government, I am wholly resigned to the simple existence of the State of Israel, dating as it does from the same year as the Empire Windrush, and I am only a qualified supporter of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, in that academic and cultural boycotts strike me as contrary to the nature of scholarship, art and science, while sporting boycotts seem cruel to very young people whose chance to compete at a certain level may come only once or twice in a lifetime.
And I contend that as the proprietor of the whole of Sky, Rupert Murdoch might do some good. There are positions that the BBC simply ignores. The workers, and not the liberal bourgeoisie, as the key swing voters. Identity issues located within the struggle for economic equality and for international peace. The leading role in the defence of universal public services of those who would otherwise lack basic amenities, and in the promotion of peace of those who would be the first to be called upon to die in wars. The decision of the EU referendum by areas that voted Labour, Liberal Democrat or Plaid Cymru. Opposition from the start to the failed programme of economic austerity.
Against all Governments since 1997, opposition to the privatisation of the NHS and other public services, to the persecution of the disabled, to the assault on civil liberties, to every British military intervention during that period, to Britain's immoral and one-sided relationship with Saudi Arabia, and to the demonisation of Russia. Rejection of any approach to climate change which would threaten jobs, workers' rights, the right to have children, travel opportunities, or universal access to a full diet. Rescue of issues such as male suicide, men's health, and fathers' rights from those whose economic and other policies have caused the problems. And refusal to recognise racists, Fascists or opportunists as the authentic voices of the accepted need to control immigration. Murdoch ought to identify and include representatives of the traditions that those and other marginalised views express in practice.
All in all, more than enough reason to want me out of circulation.
Monday 6 November 2017
Formal Complaint Against The Crown Prosecution Service
Just sent to Her Majesty’s Crown Prosecution Service Inspectorate:
Dear Sir or Madam,
I am writing to complain formally that the Crown Prosecution Service intends to proceed with my trial at Durham Crown Court on 6th December, despite the very grave danger to life that that would pose as set out here. I was initially arrested on grounds that have been entirely refuted, and then charged on further “evidence” that did not even purport to turn up until six months to the day after I had been charged, and indeed an hour and half after the hearing at which it was supposed to be submitted had been scheduled to be held.
It is a matter of record that those Labour members of Durham County Council whom I had ever met at the time that I was charged (Lyn Boyd, Joanne Carr, Malcolm Clarke, Ivan Jewell, Ossie Johnson, Carl Marshall, Linda Marshall and Olga Milburn) all consider it morally impossible for me to have committed the offence alleged against me. I am to stand trial solely on the basis of a physical impossibility, namely a fingerprint that may or may not be mine (it is not), from one hand but not the other, on one side but not the other of the fabled letter, and on it but not on the envelope in which it was posted, an envelope that carries no trace of my DNA where it was sealed.
Yet on that basis, to quote the above link: “We, the defenders of Bharat and Eretz Israel, are either going to send you to jail and then kill you when you come out, or kill you if you are not sent to jail. You are not going to Parliament, you are going to prison, and then you are going to be killed. We are the heirs of Nuthurum Godse, we are the heirs of Moshe Sneh. You are going to be killed. You, David Lindsay, are going to die at our hands for Bharat and Eretz Israel. So is any lawyer who acted in your defense in any case, anywhere in the world, for the rest of your life. So is any witness who testified in your defense in any case, anywhere in the world, for the rest of your life. So is every member of any jury or bench that acquitted you in any case, anywhere in the world, for the rest of your life. All those will be killed for the defense of Bharat and Eretz Israel.”
This is a completely and utterly outrageous endangerment of human life by the Crown Prosecution Service, and I am therefore copying this letter to my MP, to the MP for the City of Durham, and to local journalists, as well as to my solicitor.
Yours faithfully,
David Lindsay
David Lindsay
Tuesday 31 October 2017
Fabian Executive Election Result
I didn't get on, of course. As many people told me, "All the people who would have voted for you left over the coup." Still, the lowest elected candidate managed only 380 votes, and even the highest took a mere 589. 700 people could simply take over the Fabian Society.
Meanwhile, it remains the case Jeremy Corbyn is the most culturally significant British politician in living memory (he is everywhere, even on Gogglebox this week, and the little song about him is if anything even more ubiquitous in popular culture), the most agenda-setting Leader of the Opposition ever, and the global leader of the opposition to neoliberal economic policy and to neoconservative foreign policy.
Meanwhile, it remains the case Jeremy Corbyn is the most culturally significant British politician in living memory (he is everywhere, even on Gogglebox this week, and the little song about him is if anything even more ubiquitous in popular culture), the most agenda-setting Leader of the Opposition ever, and the global leader of the opposition to neoliberal economic policy and to neoconservative foreign policy.
If the Fabians are not to co-ordinate that critique at home and abroad, then who is? In preparation for the Corbyn Government that will lead Britain and the world out of politically chosen austerity, and away from wars of political choice.
Thursday 26 October 2017
Eve of Poll Card
The election for the Fabian Executive Committee is now in progress, and it will conclude at 5pm tomorrow. My 70-word statement reads:
Jeremy Corbyn is the most culturally significant British politician in living memory, the most agenda-setting Leader of the Opposition ever, and the global leader of the opposition to neoliberal economic policy and to neoconservative foreign policy. Fabians must co-ordinate that critique at home and abroad, in preparation for the Corbyn Government that will lead Britain and the world out of politically chosen austerity, and away from wars of political choice.
On the ballot paper are 27 candidates for various positions, plus one elected unopposed as Treasurer. All 28 of us have put in statements of up to 70 words. Mine, and mine alone, mentions Jeremy Corbyn at all. Voting is here. I ask for your support. Even in the time remaining, do please spread the word.
Saturday 7 October 2017
One Week To Go
On Friday, either the "case" against me will be dismissed, or all juries and benches of magistrates in the country should thereafter disregard any and everything presented by the Crown Prosecution Service on any matter apart from Hillsborough, which it and the Police refused to take up until Margaret Thatcher was dead, just as they are refusing to take up Grenfell Tower until the 45-year-old Gavin Barwell, seated next to the Prime Minister's husband as she addressed her Party Conference, is dead.
Except on Hillsborough, just acquit everyone on the spot, because the CPS will have declared in open court that it was as bent as hell, specifically in having a directly corrupt relationship with the Leader of Durham County Council, Councillor Simon Henig CBE. Whether the corruption is directly financial, or the expression of tribal fellow-feeling, perhaps including a shared and overriding civic allegiance to a foreign power, I do not know. I very strongly suspect it to be both.
But that that corruption exists at all was proved beyond reasonable doubt when I was even so much as charged. Proceeding with the action against me would call for the immediate arrest of Henig and all other participants, for conspiracy to pervert the course of justice, for malfeasance in public office, for conspiracy to murder, for international terrorism, for treason, and for anything else that one might care to list.
In the meantime, jurors and magistrates everywhere, if there is still an ongoing action against me this time next week, then just find everyone except the Hillsborough lot not guilty automatically, and let that be that, possibly forever.
I could only be convicted by a corrupted jury, and since there is not going to be a corrupted jury, then it is absolutely impossible for me to be convicted. Therefore, this whole business is, as much as anything else, a scandalous waste of public money. That money would have been, and would be, better spent on the incarceration of Lavinia Woodward, Andrew Boeckman, and their moral inferior, Simon Henig.
My victory has always been moral even if not legal, although it will also be that soon enough, so a Victory Rally will be held at a time, date and venue to be confirmed. The posters and so forth will either list Laura Pidcock MP as a speaker, or they will state that she refused to be one.
But that that corruption exists at all was proved beyond reasonable doubt when I was even so much as charged. Proceeding with the action against me would call for the immediate arrest of Henig and all other participants, for conspiracy to pervert the course of justice, for malfeasance in public office, for conspiracy to murder, for international terrorism, for treason, and for anything else that one might care to list.
In the meantime, jurors and magistrates everywhere, if there is still an ongoing action against me this time next week, then just find everyone except the Hillsborough lot not guilty automatically, and let that be that, possibly forever.
I could only be convicted by a corrupted jury, and since there is not going to be a corrupted jury, then it is absolutely impossible for me to be convicted. Therefore, this whole business is, as much as anything else, a scandalous waste of public money. That money would have been, and would be, better spent on the incarceration of Lavinia Woodward, Andrew Boeckman, and their moral inferior, Simon Henig.
My victory has always been moral even if not legal, although it will also be that soon enough, so a Victory Rally will be held at a time, date and venue to be confirmed. The posters and so forth will either list Laura Pidcock MP as a speaker, or they will state that she refused to be one.
Thursday 21 September 2017
Co-ordinate That Critique
The election for the Fabian Executive Committee is now in progress, and my 70-word statement reads:
Jeremy Corbyn is the most culturally significant British politician in living memory, the most agenda-setting Leader of the Opposition ever, and the global leader of the opposition to neoliberal economic policy and to neoconservative foreign policy. Fabians must co-ordinate that critique at home and abroad, in preparation for the Corbyn Government that will lead Britain and the world out of politically chosen austerity, and away from wars of political choice.
Jeremy Corbyn is the most culturally significant British politician in living memory, the most agenda-setting Leader of the Opposition ever, and the global leader of the opposition to neoliberal economic policy and to neoconservative foreign policy. Fabians must co-ordinate that critique at home and abroad, in preparation for the Corbyn Government that will lead Britain and the world out of politically chosen austerity, and away from wars of political choice.
This is my third attempt in a dozen years. In 2015, even the highest scoring of the 10 successful candidates won only 464 votes, while the lowest scoring was elected with a mere 305. I have won one election this year, albeit unopposed, which was not my fault. I have lost two. So here's to a score draw in the end.
On the ballot paper are 27 candidates for various positions, plus one elected unopposed as Treasurer. All 28 of us have put in statements of up to 70 words. Mine, and mine alone, mentions Jeremy Corbyn at all. A Lords frontbencher, a Commons frontbencher and two other MPs are among those who cannot even bring themselves to say his name.
Thursday 3 August 2017
On Commission
I am a candidate for Police, Crime and Victims' Commissioner for County Durham and Darlington in 2020.
The continued attempt to prosecute me for – oh, can anyone even remember what? – has no remaining motivation except to prevent my election to that office.
As such, it is an unwarranted interference in the electoral process by the Crown Prosecution Service, calling for national and international condemnation.
Monday 24 July 2017
Setting The Standard
This is to make possible the launch, in October 2017 or as soon as possible thereafter, of a new print magazine, The Weekly Standard. There will be 25 pages of popular television, pop music, and football.
And there will be 25 pages of alternatives to neoliberal economic policy and to neoconservative foreign policy, including weekly columns by Jeremy Corbyn, Richard Burgon, George Galloway, various supporters of one or more of those, paleoconservatives from both sides of the Atlantic, and the only guaranteed Liberal Democrat columnist in the national media, as well as a page of reflections from the traditions of Christianity in Britain and in the Middle East that are politically radical precisely because they are doctrinally orthodox.
In addition to the regular columns, each edition will feature five guest articles. The subjects of those are already intended to include Modern Monetary Theory, the valiant struggle of the Durham and Derby Teaching Assistants, the scandal of blacklisting in the construction industry, the fraud against the Mineworkers' Pension Scheme, the right-wing case against Trident, the case against NATO by a former Special Assistant to President Reagan, the crisis on St Helena, the Chagossians, the Dalits, the Rohingya, fathers' rights, the persecution of Dorje Shugden practitioners, the secular humanist case against assisted suicide, and the Britons fighting against the so-called Islamic State in Syria. All this, and a great deal more besides.
Alongside popular television, pop music, and football. With a serious commitment to all of them, and to the right of their fans to read intelligent comment that treats them as adults and as the citizens who most need to be equipped for the struggle against neoliberal economic policy and against neoconservative foreign policy.
And there will be 25 pages of alternatives to neoliberal economic policy and to neoconservative foreign policy, including weekly columns by Jeremy Corbyn, Richard Burgon, George Galloway, various supporters of one or more of those, paleoconservatives from both sides of the Atlantic, and the only guaranteed Liberal Democrat columnist in the national media, as well as a page of reflections from the traditions of Christianity in Britain and in the Middle East that are politically radical precisely because they are doctrinally orthodox.
In addition to the regular columns, each edition will feature five guest articles. The subjects of those are already intended to include Modern Monetary Theory, the valiant struggle of the Durham and Derby Teaching Assistants, the scandal of blacklisting in the construction industry, the fraud against the Mineworkers' Pension Scheme, the right-wing case against Trident, the case against NATO by a former Special Assistant to President Reagan, the crisis on St Helena, the Chagossians, the Dalits, the Rohingya, fathers' rights, the persecution of Dorje Shugden practitioners, the secular humanist case against assisted suicide, and the Britons fighting against the so-called Islamic State in Syria. All this, and a great deal more besides.
Alongside popular television, pop music, and football. With a serious commitment to all of them, and to the right of their fans to read intelligent comment that treats them as adults and as the citizens who most need to be equipped for the struggle against neoliberal economic policy and against neoconservative foreign policy.
Friday 30 June 2017
"A Good Man Fallen Among Fabians"?
Very soon, the Fabian Executive will be up for election. Members will vote for up to 10 candidates, and the top 10 will be elected for a two-year term, provided that at least two must be under 31 years of age at the time of election. There are also a few regional and other reps, but the 10 are the big ones.
My 70-word statement will read: “Jeremy Corbyn is the most culturally significant British politician in living memory, the most agenda-setting Leader of the Opposition ever, and the global leader of the opposition to neoliberal economic policy and to neoconservative foreign policy. Fabians must co-ordinate that critique at home and abroad, in preparation for the Corbyn Government that will lead Britain and the world out of politically chosen austerity, and away from wars of political choice.”
In 2015, even the highest scoring of the 10 successful candidates won only 464 votes, while the lowest scoring was elected with a mere 305. You do not necessarily have to be a member of the Labour Party, or anything like that. The
Fabian Society can be joined here. But hurry. And if possible, then do please let me know: davidaslindsay@hotmail.com.
The Executive meets quarterly, and if we could stretch to 10 candidates, of whom at least two were under 31, then so much the better in order to take control of the Society’s prestigious name and not inconsiderable resources for publication and conference purposes. But come what may, I for one will certainly be doing this. Third time lucky? Luck does not enter into it.
Tuesday 27 June 2017
Proudly Parochial
The supporters, and perhaps even the persons, of Jeremy Corbyn and Tom Watson ought to keep in mind that they owe their respective positions to the votes of large numbers of the same people. In similar vein, I am getting it in both my left and my right ears about Lanchester Parish Council. As a former long-serving member, who stood down voluntarily in 2013 and who then failed to win back his seat this year, I comment with some trepidation. But people have asked for my view. Therefore, here it is.
I voted for 15 candidates to fill the 15 seats on Lanchester Parish Council, and 12 of those candidates were elected. Among those 12 were, and are, Labour, Independent, Conservative and Liberal Democrat representatives. No one on that Council would have been elected on the votes of people who had voted only Labour, or only Independent, or only Conservative, or only Liberal Democrat. Such ballot papers were submitted, but I was at the count, and I can assure you that there were not enough of them to have elected anybody. Everyone who was elected ought to keep that in mind.
Monday 26 June 2017
Unallowable
Most people have no idea that the councillor's allowance exists, and most of those have no idea how much it is. To the general public, being on the council is voluntary work in the evenings, by people with full-time day jobs. How little they realise. Although the allowance is paid for attendance at as few as four meetings per year. Anything over and above that is, in that narrow sense, voluntary.
At the very least, it ought to be illegal for any council pay any of its staff less than it paid its members. And at the very, very least, the Leader of the Labour Party ought not to appear on a platform with any member of the majority Group on any council that failed to adhere to that rule. Such a member ought to be booed heartily by the crowd at, for example, the Durham Miners' Gala.
The basic allowance for a member of Durham County Council is £13,300. The pay of at least a large minority of that authority's Teaching Assistants will soon be less than that.
Friday 23 June 2017
Teaching Assistance, Indeed
I do not mean this question rhetorically. What says my Member of Parliament, and apparently now my near neighbour, Laura Pidcock, on the latest development in the saga of Durham County Council and the Teaching Assistants? On her answer depends whether or not she will be worth a vote at the next General Election, no matter how desperately one might yearn for a Corbyn Government, a yearning that is not shared by the Leadership of Durham County Council. The same is true of every other Labour MP is this county, which is of course every other MP at all in this county.
Laura walked out of the Teaching Assistants' Solidarity Rally when their principal spokeswoman on last night's Look North, a Lanchester resident who is therefore also now a constituent of Laura's, called for a vote against every Labour candidate at what were then the forthcoming local elections. Under the influence of people very close to Laura, and of one in particular, the TAs seemed to back away from that simple and brilliant strategy.
As a result, Labour kept control of Durham County Council and the injustice continues unrectified. If Labour had lost that control, then it would have been possible to call for a Labour vote at the recent General Election, and it would be possible to call for a Labour vote at the forthcoming one. But as things stood, that was possible only at Easington last time. Will it be possible anywhere else next time?
As a result, Labour kept control of Durham County Council and the injustice continues unrectified. If Labour had lost that control, then it would have been possible to call for a Labour vote at the recent General Election, and it would be possible to call for a Labour vote at the forthcoming one. But as things stood, that was possible only at Easington last time. Will it be possible anywhere else next time?
The Teaching Assistants will march again at the Durham Miners' Gala this year. One speaker, Steve Gillan of the Prison Officers' Association, has already assured me that he will march with them. Will Jeremy Corbyn, Angela Rayner, Ken Loach and Len McCluskey, all of whom have offered strong support in the past, do likewise? For that matter, will Laura Pidcock, who already seems to be getting a lot of coverage as a poster girl for the Left?
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