Ready And Willing, I Just Need To Be Made Able

Theresa May will bring back no other deal than this. At that point, the DUP will at least abstain rather than save her Government from the Motion of No Confidence that Jeremy Corbyn will then table. The Government will therefore lose, and there will be a General Election.

That will lead to another hung Parliament, meaning that one MP will be able to make a huge amount of difference. I will stand for this parliamentary seat of North West Durham, if I can raise the £10,000 necessary to mount a serious campaign. By common consent, Labour, the Conservatives and I are each on 30 per cent support, so that any one of us could be the First Past the Post. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

Here I Stand

“David Lindsay has generated a brilliant reconciliation of the conflicting strains of the Labour Tradition and is worthy of the closest attention.” Dr Maurice Glasman, Lord Glasman of Stoke Newington and Stamford Hill; Senior Lecturer in Political Theory and Director of the Faith and Citizenship Programme, London Metropolitan University; founder of Blue Labour.

“Current orthodoxy – both in economic policy and right across the board – has so manifestly failed us that we desperately need some fresh thinking and a different way of looking at our problems. That is precisely what David Lindsay provides.” Professor Bryan Gould, Labour MP for Southampton Test, 1974-1979; Labour MP for Dagenham, 1983-1994; Shadow Cabinet Member, 1986-1994; Leadership Candidate, 1992.

“Before Red Tory and Blue Labour there was David Lindsay. He was arguably the first to announce a postliberal politics of paradox, and to delve into the deep, unwritten British past in order to craft, theoretically, an alternative British and international future. It is high time that the singular and yet wholly pertinent writings of this County Durham Catholic Labour prophet receive a wider circulation.” Professor John Milbank, Professor in Religion, Politics and Ethics, University of Nottingham.

Those commendations were written in 2012, before Donald Trump and Jeremy Corbyn, before Brexit and the gilets jaunes. Each of those is better than the alternative, better than Hillary Clinton and her British Labour wannabes, better than the European Union and Emmanuel Macron. In 2019, much of the material contained here has elicited this response: “I warm to its spirit. It represents an important strand of thinking and feeling in our country which we ignore at our peril.” Those are the words of Professor Robert Skidelsky FBA, Lord Skidelsky, Emeritus Professor of Political Economy in the University of Warwick, author of Keynes: The Return of the Master, and co-author of How Much is Enough? The Love of Money and the Case for the Good Life. 

The next General Election will certainly result in another hung Parliament, regardless of who led any party, but simply because of what is now the shape of the three polities across which it will be held: England and Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. One MP will therefore be able to make a huge amount of difference. Here in North West Durham, it has become a commonplace that the Labour Party, the Conservative Party and I are each on 30 per cent support, so that any one of us could be the First Past the Post. I have no interest in being a paper candidate. But I will stand if I can raise the £10,000 necessary to mount a serious campaign. Anyone in a position to help, however much or little, please contact davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. I am a local, experienced and inclusive candidate whose radically practical polices are rooted in radically traditional values.

A Local, Experienced, Inclusive Candidate

I was born in 1977, and I have lived in North West Durham since 1982. I never went to school anywhere else, and I went to university at Durham. I was an elected member of Lanchester Parish Council from 1999 to 2013, a governor of Lanchester Endowed Parochial Primary School from 1999 to 2007, and a governor of Saint Bede’s from 2000 to 2008. I am currently one of Derwentside’s elected public governors of County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust. I was elected unopposed. I have had several periods of involvement with Willow Burn Hospice since the middle of the 1990s.

I have nothing against the present MP personally, and she may or may not be the Labour candidate next time. But at the turn of 2017 she had never set eyes on North West Durham, and there was no local involvement whatever in her selection as a candidate. She has never expressed any of the opinions articulated here. Indeed, she has expressed very few political opinions altogether. Hers is a certain mood or tone, rather than any specific programme or philosophy. It has now been more than two years since the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party effectively abolished the Constituency Labour Party in North West Durham by denying it any role in the selection of its parliamentary candidate. It then imposed a 29-year-old who had never set foot here, and of whom next to no one here had ever heard. Soon afterwards, she lost her seat on Northumberland County Council. I was present when she received that news, at the count for Durham County Council, where she was being introduced as the all-done-and-dusted Prospective Parliamentary Candidate to stalwarts who did not even know her name, but several of whom had already bought me drinks. For some years by then, certain of them had been introducing me at funerals as, “The man who should have been our MP.” Everyone does that now, and there no longer even needs to have been a death. They also call me “Speedboat”, as in, “Here’s what you could have won.”

I am both a product and a feature of the political pluralism of North West Durham, where Labour holds fewer than half of the County Council seats, where the Conservative parliamentary candidate won 34.5 per cent at the last General Election, where the Liberal Democrat candidate cut the Labour majority in half in 2010, and where an Independent kept his deposit both in 2005 and in 2010. Wear Valley was controlled for a time by the Liberal Democrats, who remained numerous on it until its abolition. Derwentside was in practice controlled by an alliance between the Independents and that section of the local Labour Party which now supports my parliamentary candidacy; its Leader from that time, Councillor Alex Watson OBE, is one of my Campaign Patrons. When Chris Williamson was the Leader of Derby City Council, then he held that position in coalition with the Conservative Party, since such an approach is normal on the grown-up Left. Another Campaign Patron is Davey Ayre, a legendary local trade unionist. Moreover, George Galloway has never formally resigned as my third Campaign Patron. It is now up to him, having read this pamphlet of which he is one of the dedicatees, to consider how best to resume those duties.

As an example of my political approach, which is normal on the grown-up Left, at the 2017 Election to Lanchester Parish Council, I voted for 15 candidates who were variously Labour, Independent, Conservative, Liberal Democrat, and of No Description. 12 of my choices were elected, covering the first four of those five categories. The treatment of the County Durham Teaching Assistants made it impossible for me to vote Labour either for the County Council or for the House of Commons in 2017. For the record, I voted for myself and an Independent for the Council, and I voted for the Teaching Assistants’ Liberal Democrat champion, Owen Temple, for Parliament. At the five European Elections of my adult lifetime, I have voted, not without reservation in each case, for the Socialist Labour Party, for Respect, for No2EU, for the Labour Party, and, in the absence of No2EU or of anything like it, for the Brexit Party.

It will be clear, then, that I am firmly a man of the Left, committed to economic equality and to international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends. Economic inequality is incompatible with democracy, since it gives the rich far greater political power than the poor, whose votes are thus effectively negated. In the struggle for the universal good that is economic equality, the leading role belongs to the working class, of which the leading part is the trade union and cooperative movements. In the struggle for the universal good that is international peace, the leading role belongs to the working class and to the youth. Those struggles are fundamental and integral to each other, and the anti-racist and anti-imperialist struggle, which is indivisible in itself, is fundamental and integral to each and both of them. The class oppression in these Islands goes back to the Norman Conquest, while our particular form of capitalism was shaped by the slave trade, so that they both have racist and imperialist roots.

I am not “For the Many, Not the Few”. I am “For Everyone”. I reject class conflict in favour of “a platform broad enough for all to stand upon”. Although I have now been out of the Labour Party for far longer than I was ever in it, I am a committed but critical supporter of Jeremy Corbyn, who has opened up the debate on economic and foreign policy for the first time in a generation. Before the summer of 2015, Britain had an unquestionable State ideology in international affairs and in relation to the architecture of the economy. It was occasionally possible to make a small and probably jocular criticism of the Government. But it was effectively forbidden to criticise the State. We saw that most starkly at the funeral of Margaret Thatcher, when the State ideology’s idol was paraded through the streets of the capital city to receive the obeisance of the once-great national institutions. Corbyn has brought onto the platform the voices of opposition in principle to politically chosen austerity and to wars of political choice. Before him, no one would have questioned Boris Johnson’s assertion that people whose personal incomes were between twice and well over three times the national median household income were “middle earners”.

I wrote and sent the following letter, which appeared in The Times on 18th August 2015:

Dear Sir,

We do not all hold British nationality or reside in the United Kingdom, although some of us do. We are not all members or supporters of the British Labour Party, although some of us are. However, we are united in rejecting the charge of “economic illiteracy” against Jeremy Corbyn, and in recognising that his economic analysis and proposals are, at the very least, superior to those of the current British Government, as well as being more comprehensive and coherent than those of any other candidate for Labour Leader.

Yours faithfully,

David Lindsay, Lanchester, County Durham

Professor Victoria Chick, Emeritus Professor of Economics, University College London

Professor Alfredo Saad Filho, Professor of Political Economy, Department of Development Studies, The School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London

Professor John Grahl, Professor of European Integration, Middlesex University Business School

Professor Stuart Holland, Visiting Professor, Faculty of Economics, University of Coimbra, Portugal; Senior Scholar of the Institute of Social and European Studies, Köszeg, Hungary; Member of Parliament for Vauxhall, 1979-1989

Professor Christopher May, Professor of Political Economy and Faculty Associate Dean for Enterprise, Lancaster University

Professor Ozlem Onaran, Professor of Workforce and Economic Development Policy, University of Greenwich

Professor Prem Sikka, Professor of Accounting, Essex Business School, University of Essex

Professor Pritam Singh, Professor of Economics, Department of Accounting, Finance and Economics, Oxford Brookes University

Professor Robert H. Wade, Professor of Political Economy and Development, Department of International Development, London School of Economics; Leontief Prize in Economics 2008

Dr David Harvie, Senior Lecturer in Finance and Political Economy, School of Management, University of Leicester

Ismail Ertürk, Senior Lecturer, Manchester Business School, University of Manchester

Ewa Karwowski, Lecturer in Economics, Kingston University, London

Nevertheless, Corbyn has overlooked his supporters by appointing his enemies to frontbench and other positions. He has permitted a free vote on Syria. He has whipped an abstention on Trident, which there is absolutely no suggestion that a Corbyn Government might scrap, while there is more chance that Donald Trump’s America might leave NATO than that Corbyn’s Britain might do so. He has never brought the arming of the Saudi war in Yemen back to the floor of the House of Commons for another vote. His housing and transport policies go nowhere near far enough. He has done nothing to bring into the mainstream the Modern Monetary Theory that saw Professor Stephanie Kelton designated as Chief Economist for the Democratic Minority Staff of the Senate Budget Committee, hotbed of Trotskyism that that is. Nor has he done anything to bring into the mainstream the Universal Basic Income that has been accepted even by the Adam Smith Institute.

Corbyn supports the Government’s indulgence of the ludicrous theory of gender self-identification, and he sides with neoliberal capitalism in supporting the legalisation of drugs and prostitution. He has allowed, and even caused, the dissipation of his initial following among the young male victims of anti-industrial economic policy and of belligerent foreign policy. He supports the Government’s anti-industrial Malthusianism of net zero carbon emissions, for which the country has never voted. He wants a Customs Union with the European Union, possibly even at the price of accepting its State Aid rules. He now favours a second referendum on EU membership, and a vote to Remain. He has accepted some of the Government’s baseless and collapsed claims about Salisbury, Amesbury, and Douma.

Corbyn has acted against the social and ethnic cleansing of Labour Haringey, but he has failed to secure justice for the 472 Teaching Assistants in Labour Durham. He has reacted wrongly to the provocative extension of a State Visit to President Trump. He has conceded the unfounded existence of widespread anti-Semitism in the Labour Party, he has taken with complete seriousness the self-appointed “community leaders” of British Jews, he has accepted the deeply flawed IHRA Definition, he has submitted to the presumed right of the “Equality” and Human Rights Commission to enforce that Definition as if it were the law of the land, and he has failed to prevent the expulsion of distinguished black and other activists from the Labour Party on trumped up charges using that Definition, even though some of those black and other activists have themselves been Jewish. Under Corbyn’s Leadership, Tony Greenstein, Jackie Walker and Marc Wadsworth have all been expelled, something of which Tony Blair could never have dreamed. Corbyn has failed to point out that Pete Willsman had been stating the facts about Israeli Embassy interference, as had been captured on film between Shai Masot and Joan Ryan. Both Labour Party membership and the Labour Whip can now be refused or revoked by the Israeli Ambassador. “If you deny the problem, then you are part of the problem,” is the cry of the witchfinder down the ages. Corbyn has failed to defend either Chris Williamson or Kelvin Hopkins. And he has failed to insist that Julian Assange not be extradited to anywhere under any circumstance, which is the wedge issue that is being used to define a pantomime Left that would be acceptable to the official media for the purposes of pretended balance. The same or similar criticisms may and must be made of such figures as Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ayanna Pressley, and Ilhan Omar.

I believe in liberty, equality and fraternity. Liberty is the freedom to be virtuous, and to do anything not specifically proscribed. Equality is the means to liberty, and includes the Welfare State, workers’ rights, consumer protection, local government, a strong Parliament, and public ownership. And fraternity is the means to equality, taking such forms as trade unions, cooperatives, credit unions, mutual guarantee societies, and mutual building societies. Liberty, equality and fraternity are therefore inseparable from nationhood, a space in which to be unselfish. Thus from family, the nation in miniature, where unselfishness is first learned. And thus from property, which is each family’s safeguard both against over-mighty commercial interests and against an over-mighty State, and which therefore needs to be as widely diffused as possible, as the guarantor of liberty. The family, private property and the State must be protected and promoted on the basis of their common origin and their interdependence.

I am therefore committed to economic equality and to international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends. Economic inequality is incompatible with democracy, since it effectively nullifies the votes of the poor. Since there cannot be a “free” market in general, but not in drugs or prostitution, including pornography, so there must not be a “free” market in general. Since there cannot be a “free” market in drugs or prostitution, but not in general, so there must not be a “free” market in drugs or prostitution. Since there cannot be the unrestricted movement of goods, services and capital, but not of labour and thus of people, so there must not be the unrestricted movement of goods, services and capital. Since there cannot be the unrestricted movement of labour and thus of people, but not of goods, services and capital, so there must not be the unrestricted movement of labour. If “there is no such thing as society”, then there can be no such thing as the society that is the family, or the society that is the nation.

Only 40 years 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 indeed happened. And it is still going on. To regret that must be to regret the defeat of the miners in 1985, and vice versa. To seek to reverse it must be to attend the Durham Miners’ Gala if at all possible.

On those grounds, and indeed on all of the grounds that are set out in this book, I was active in Blue Labour while it was active, I remain so insofar as it remains so, I supported Ed Miliband from the start of his Leadership campaign to the end of his Leadership (even while disagreeing with him, especially on Libya), I still think that he would have made a good Prime Minister, I supported Andy Burnham until the infamous Labour abstention on the Welfare Bill made Jeremy Corbyn my only rather than my second preference, I supported Tom Watson’s Deputy Leadership campaign from start to finish, I continue on balance to support his Deputy Leadership in principle, I have repeatedly sought election to the Executive Committee of the Fabian Society, I voted proudly for Pat Glass in 2015, and I would have done so again in 2017.

I am not a Marxist. Marxism asks many of the right questions, but it also gives many of the wrong answers. Straightforwardly, I do not believe in dialectical materialism. Nor do I believe in Marxism’s sense of its own inevitability. We have had to fight for everything that we have gained, and we have to fight to save it. Rather, I stand in the pro-business tradition that came down to the Attlee Government from the ultraconservative figures of Colbert and Bismarck, via the Liberals Keynes and Beveridge, and which held sway in Britain until the Callaghan Government’s turn to monetarism in 1977. Britain did not experience a post-War decline. This country’s people were not worse off in the 1970s than they had been in the 1930s. Was the phrase “the sick man of Europe” employed to refer to Britain in any other language? The European Free Trade Association was sorry enough to see us leave, while the European Communities were pleased enough to see us join and then stay. We cannot have seemed too sick to any of those 15 other European countries.

That British tradition grew from many and various roots, trade union and cooperative, Radical Liberal and Tory populist, Christian Socialist and Social Catholic, Guild Socialist and Distributist, Fabian and Marxist. It therefore corresponds in many and various ways to phenomena on the Continent and elsewhere that would not ordinarily be regarded as having much, if anything, to do with each other. And it corresponds closely but critically to the Hamiltonian American School as expanded by the American System of Henry Clay, a pro-business tradition that between the 1860s and the 1970s worked to make the United States the world’s largest economy, with the world’s highest standard of living, culminating in the glorious achievements of the New Deal, which in turn made possible the rise and triumph of the Civil Rights movement.

That was achieved, by Democrats and Republicans alike, through the strict division between investment banking and retail banking, with large amounts of federal credit (in Britain, that would be central government credit), at low interest rates and over a long term, to build great national projects, notably enormous expansions in infrastructure, which then paid for themselves many times over. There were pro-business tariffs and subsidies, and there was a pro-business National Bank to promote the growth of productive enterprises rather than speculation. Britain and America both need a lot more of this today. North West Durham needs it more than most.

Therefore, I would appoint an Independent, a Labourite, a Conservative and a Liberal Democrat in each of the County Wards, ideally including at least one person in each of the former District Wards, to work with me and with local people. I would also appoint a Political Advisor from within each of the Independent, Labour, Conservative, and Liberal Democrat blocs. If he were amenable, then my Labour Political Advisor would be Neil Fleming, who was previously the Labour Party’s Head of Press and Broadcasting, and who was then its London Regional Director. The Brexit Party did well here at the European Elections, but people here would not vote for any General Election manifesto that might be acceptable to Nigel Farage.

In the coming hung Parliament, the price of my support for any Government, even a Corbyn Government, would be the necessary support for a number of projects in each of the former District Wards equal to the former number of District Councillors, together with justice for the 472 Teaching Assistants whose pay Durham County Council had cut by 23 per cent, together with not less than the retention or restoration of the level of hospital provision in Consett in July 2019, and together with the implementation of the plan for the rail service in the North of England that was advanced in June 2018 by well over 20 local and regional newspapers. In Lanchester, the three projects would include both proper flood defences at long last, and the restoration of the bus services that Labour-controlled Durham County Council has slashed to the bone. In Weardale, I would require the Sixth Form provision on which the present MP for North West Durham has said a very great deal while delivering little or nothing. That MP has appointed as her Political Advisor the man whose political advice led the Teaching Assistants to their present predicament.

I am now working with all of the non-Labour members of Durham County Council and with the trade unions, to bring Volkswagen’s production for the British market to County Durham after, or even before, Brexit. I am more than open to further suggestions along similar lines. Among many other things, this project will guarantee the financial future of the Durham Miners’ Gala and of the Durham Miners’ Hall. The absence of the County Council Labour Group is that Group’s own sorry fault. I unreservedly condemn the decision of that Group to award to the Kier Group, with its history of blacklisting, the contract to build the new headquarters of Durham County Council.

I would cooperate with people of all parties and none, in order to implement Theresa May’s original Prime Ministerial 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, 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 same applies to everything in Boris Johnson’s Golden Age speech, except on stop and search, and except on the prioritisation of net zero carbon emissions, which it is very difficult to see as compatible with the pro-industrial content of the rest of the speech.

As the Member of Parliament for North West Durham, my Westminster office would be a global centre for the broadly based opposition and alternative to neoliberal economic policy and to neoconservative foreign policy, strongly asserting that that opposition and that alternative were the real centre ground. My candidacy is already endorsed by Dr Philip M. Giraldi, Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, Washington, D.C.; former CIA counterterrorism specialist and military intelligence officer; and foreign policy advisor to the 2008 Presidential campaign of Ron Paul. It also endorsed by Dr Leon Hadar of Chevy Chase, Maryland, and of Tel Aviv, Israel; Contributing Editor of The American Conservative; Commentator, Quillette, Sydney, Australia; Washington Correspondent and Columnist, The Business Times, Singapore; and foreign policy advisor to the 2008 Presidential campaign of Ron Paul.

Buy the book here.

Crowdfunding My Parliamentary Campaign

I’m back, here: 

I was the only journalist to predict a hung Parliament in 2017, and I am predicting another hung Parliament at the next General Election. One MP is going to be able to make all the difference. Local information already has me on 30-30-30 with Labour and the Conservatives here in North West Durham, meaning that any of us could be the First Past the Post. All that I need is the £10,000 with which to mount a serious campaign, plus the crowdfunding fee. I have no interest in being a paper candidate.

I was born in 1977, and I have lived in North West Durham since 1982. I never went to school anywhere else, and I went to university at Durham. I was an elected member of Lanchester Parish Council from 1999 to 2013, a governor (including a time as Vice Chair) of Lanchester Endowed Parochial Primary School from 1999 to 2007, and a governor of Saint Bede’s from 2000 to 2008. I am currently one of Derwentside’s elected public governors of County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust; to the best of my knowledge, I am the only person ever to have been elected to that Council of Governors unopposed. I have had several periods of involvement with Willow Burn Hospice over the last 25 years. 

I am both a product and a feature of the political pluralism of North West Durham, where Labour holds fewer than half of the County Council seats, where the Conservative parliamentary candidate won 34 per cent of the vote last year, where the Liberal Democrat candidate cut the Labour majority in half in 2010, and where an Independent kept his deposit both in 2005 and in 2010. Wear Valley was controlled for a time by the Liberal Democrats, who remained numerous on it until its abolition. Derwentside was in practice controlled by an alliance between the Independents and that section of the local Labour Party which now supports my parliamentary candidacy; its Leader from that time, Councillor Alex Watson OBE, is one of my Campaign Patrons. My other Campaign Patron is Davey Ayre, a legendary local trade unionist.

I would appoint an Independent, a Labourite, a Conservative and a Liberal Democrat in each of the County Wards, ideally including at least one person in each of the former District Wards, to work with me and with local people. I would also appoint a Policy Advisor from within each of the Independent, Labour, Conservative, and Liberal Democrat blocs, and I hereby offer first refusal on that Labour position to my old comrade Neil Fleming, who is now living here again after his time as Head of Press and Broadcasting for the Labour Party and as its London Regional Director.

The price of my support for any Government in the coming hung Parliament would be the necessary support for a number of projects in each of the former District Wards equal to the former number of District Councillors, together with justice for the 472 Teaching Assistants whose pay Durham County Council had cut by 23 per cent, and together with the implementation of the plan for the rail service in the North of England that was recently advanced by well over 20 local and regional newspapers, most of which have never supported Labour, and only one of which did so last year. And yes, I do mean the price of my support for any Government. Even a Government that was headed by Jeremy Corbyn, whom I broadly, but not uncritically, support. Two of the three such projects in Lanchester would be the restoration of the full bus service and the construction of adequate flood defences, while one in Weardale would be the saving of the Sixth Form at Wolsingham.

I am now working with all of the non-Labour members of Durham County Council and with the trade unions, to bring Volkswagen’s production for the British market to County Durham after, or even before, Brexit. I am more than open to further suggestions along similar lines. Among many other things, this project will guarantee the financial future of the Durham Miners’ Gala and of the Durham Miners’ Hall. The absence of the County Council Labour Group is that Group’s own sorry fault.

I strongly support the exploitation of the vast reserves of coal in this country and in this county. That, and the extension of civil nuclear power, are the means of delivering highly paid, highly skilled, high status, unionised jobs while securing independence from Arab oil, from Russian gas, and from coal that has been mined using child and slave labour. From North Korea, Donald Trump intends his dynasty to supply a dependent world with the coal of the Kim dynasty deep into the twenty-second century. Yet we have our own, right here under our feet. Horror stories about how coal was burned or mined in the Britain of the twentieth century have no relevance to the Britain of the twenty-first. At the same time, I am totally opposed to the open-casting of the Pont Valley or anywhere else, digging up hardly any coal while employing hardly anyone. On those same grounds, I am also totally opposed to fracking.

I would co-operate with people of all parties and none, in order to implement Theresa May’s original Prime Ministerial 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, 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, while returning to her world-leading record of work against human trafficking and modern slavery, not least now that slavery has returned to Libya.

As the Member of Parliament for North West Durham, my Westminster office would be a global centre for the broadly based opposition and alternative to neoliberal economic policy and to neoconservative foreign policy, strongly asserting that that opposition and that alternative were the real centre ground. My candidacy is already endorsed by Dr Philip M. Giraldi, Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, Washington, D.C.; former CIA counterterrorism specialist and military intelligence officer; and foreign policy advisor to the 2008 Presidential campaign of Ron Paul. It also endorsed by Dr Leon Hadar of Chevy Chase, Maryland, and of Tel Aviv, Israel; Contributing Editor of The American Conservative; Commentator, Quillette; Washington Correspondent and Columnist, The Business Times, Singapore; and foreign policy advisor to the 2008 Presidential campaign of Ron Paul.

I have spent more than 20 years, since I was just about still in my teens and had never seen the Internet, trying to get the story out about Harriet Harman and the Paedophile Information Exchange. I have paid a terrible journalistic and political price for it, but I have no regrets. Media that always knew about it simply ignored the whole thing, banning me from their websites and what have you, until a period of no more than two weeks when they needed to distract attention from Patrick Rock. Normal service was rapidly resumed, and it has continued ever since. No one has done more on this issue than I have. No one. And now, the plan is advancing to make Harman the next Speaker of the House of Commons. Not only would I oppose her election, but, were she already in post, then I would oppose her re-election at the start of the next Parliament.

I am actively involved in campaigns for truth and justice as various, and yet as inseparable from each other, as Hillsborough, Shrewsbury, Orgreave, Grenfell Tower, blacklisting, spycops, George Bell, Julian Assange, the Miami Showband massacre, the Marikana massacre, support for the Dalits, support for the Rohingya and other minorities in Myanmar, support for the Chagossians, support for Abdullah Öcalan and the wider Kurdish cause, support for the deportation of Altaf Hussain to Pakistan, support for an inquiry into the role of the Thatcher Government in the 1984 storming of the Golden Temple and in the events surrounding it, support for the Dorje Shugden practitioners who are being persecuted by the Dalai Lama, support for the Russian and other ethnic minorities who are oppressed in the Baltic States, support for the ancient indigenous Christians of the Middle East and North Africa (and not least of the Holy Land), support for those in Israel who are opposed to the apartheid Nation-State Law, and support for the Jews and Zoroastrians of Iran. As the Member of Parliament for North West Durham, I would board a plane to Tehran and simply refuse to leave without Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and Abbas Edalat. My Westminster office would be a global centre for the coordination of these and numerous other campaigns for truth and justice at home and abroad.

My views on a wide range of issues may be read here. Any money raised over and above the target of £15,000 would be donated to other candidates, of any party or none, who broadly shared those values and policies. Very many thanks.

Bring It On

"Here in North West Durham, @LauraPidcockMP, the even worse @davidaslindsay, and the Tories are on 30-30-30. Any of them could be the First Past the Post. But @DPJHodges is to contest this seat against all of them. @GuidoFawkes @afneil @hurryupharry @TheNorthernEcho @ChronicleLive"

Also, complete with a large photograph of me, my article about my case is on page 6 of the latest edition of The Word.

Justice Delayed Is Justice Denied

If there is one group of people against whom I have no complaint, then it is the Police. If you say that I have my outfits and my accent to thank for that, then remember that my outfits and my accent are at the service of the voters, should they so choose. I have just had another highly fruitful meeting with the Police, who are clearly as fed up as I am with how I have been treated. How have I been treated? Read on.

On 13th March 2017, I was arrested for sending a death threat to a large number of members of Durham County Council. On 13th April, to the shocked disbelief of the Police and after six or seven hours on the part of the Crown Prosecution Service, I was charged. I was supposed to stand trial on 6th December. It was “postponed”. I was supposed to stand trial on 11th April 2018, a year after I had been charged. That, too, was “postponed”. Since then, I have had no trial date, despite my having been on bail since 13th March 2017.

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.

On what grounds was I arrested and charged? None whatever. Literally none. The supposed similarities between the letter and my published work were comprehensively refuted when the Police first interviewed me, on 13th March 2017. Those similarities either did not exist, or they were attributed quotations from the work of other people, including William Shakespeare. The hypothetical possibility of a fingerprint was also dealt with and dismissed in full on that occasion, as being entirely explicable in terms of my having at some time loaded a ream on paper into the printer at either of the public libraries that I frequented, and indeed continue to frequent. 

I was charged on the basis of the existence of two fingerprints that were supposed to have been mine beyond reasonable doubt. Yet six months later to the day, the Crown produced only one fingerprint that may or may not have come (as, in point of fact, it had not) from one of my hands but not from the other, on one side but not the other of a folded piece of paper that any of hundreds of other people might also have touched, but not on the envelope in which it was posted. That envelope bore no trace of my DNA where it had been sealed, and it has in any case since been destroyed as common office waste.

The contortions required would defeat even someone a very great deal less arthritic than I, if they would be possible at all. Am I to be expected to stand in a dock or a witness box and wave my two hands in order to demonstrate, both that I had such, and that it caused me intense pain to exert them? Is it imagined that that would add to the majesty of the law, in which some of us simple souls still believe profoundly? 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.

There is no other fingerprint evidence, which is to say that there is no fingerprint evidence whatever. There is no computer evidence. There is no electronic evidence of any kind. There is no handwriting evidence. There is no DNA evidence. There is no proof of postage. I shall say that again: there is no evidence that the letter was ever posted, not only by me, but by anyone. If there is no public interest in prosecuting the father of Poppi Worthington, then there is certainly none in prosecuting me. 

Although I have had no contact with any alleged victim in this case while these matters have been ongoing, none of them has removed me as a friend on Facebook, nor has any of them stopped following me on Twitter. That includes the complainant in this case, who, entirely by his own choice, both remains my friend on Facebook, and continues to follow me on Twitter. 

The Crown Prosecution Service caused all of my 32 character witnesses to be disallowed, because it knew that the testimony of any one of them would have guaranteed my acquittal: past and present members of both Houses of Parliament, local councillors including several alleged victims in this case, senior members of the Catholic and Anglican clergy, distinguished academics, leading journalists, Justices of the Peace, a Presiding Justice in Court, and so on. But at least one of those has simply sent in his character reference 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.

Nevertheless, my good character is evidenced by the fact that while these proceedings have been ongoing, I have been elected unopposed as a Public Governor of County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust, the only unopposed election of which I have ever heard there, and possibly the only one that there has ever been. And I have taken a creditable 203 votes for the Lanchester Ward of Durham County Council, as well as a more than creditable 302 votes for Lanchester Parish Council. Those figures are universally regarded as having been artificially reduced by the persecution of me. Even so, though, my neighbours voted for me in their hundreds. The verdict of my peers, indeed.

Over, Therefore, To The Police

At two o'clock this afternoon, I shall hand in this letter to the designated Police Officer at Durham Constabulary's headquarters, Aykley Heads:

15th August 2018

Dear [name],

I am writing for the third time to report the criminal offences committed by the then Prime Minister, Tony Blair, and by the then Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, as outlined in the two reports that were published in June 2018 by the Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament (ISC) into the United Kingdom’s involvement in numerous cases of rendition and torture. Those ISC reports detailed a large number of cases where MI5 or MI6 had suggested, planned or agreed to overseas rendition operations, and more than 200 cases where they had sent questions to overseas governments and interrogators knowing or suspecting that detainees were being mistreated. However, the ISC has said that it had been blocked by the Government from accessing all the necessary evidence, and thus prevented from conducting a credible, thorough inquiry. Over, therefore, to the Police.

I am also writing for the third time to report the crimes of malfeasance in public office, conspiracy to pervert the course of justice, and wasting Police time, that have been committed by the Leader of Durham County Council, Simon Henig, and by the Director of Public Prosecutions, Alison Saunders. There is more evidence on which to arrest Henig and Saunders than there was on which to charge me. The supposed similarities between my published work and the letter that is at the centre of my case were comprehensively refuted when the Police first interviewed me, on 13th March 2017. There is no fingerprint evidence. There is no computer evidence. There is no electronic evidence of any kind. There is no handwriting evidence. There is no DNA evidence. There is no proof of postage. Yet I was charged. Certainly, that decision involved Alison Saunders. I submit that it is worthy of investigation that it also involved Simon Henig.

It is impossible to rule out an anti-Catholic aspect to this case, and impossible to ignore the fact that I am mixed-race. No one wishes to suggest that County Durham has reverted or regressed to a past that was comparable to the darkest days of Northern Ireland or of the American Deep South, with no dividing line between the Police, a massively dominant local political party, and a secret society bound by oaths. No one wishes to do that. But no one should be shy of doing it if necessary. I say again that there is more evidence on which to arrest Simon Henig and Alison Saunders, as there is on which to arrest Tony Blair and Jack Straw, than there ever was to charge me. In support of that assertion, I point to the fact that I have still never been brought to trial. Nevertheless, the Police still have my telephone, although I can be contacted on davidaslindsay@hotmail.com.

Yours sincerely, 

[Signed by hand]

David Lindsay (Mr)

Coming To A Head

At two o'clock tomorrow afternoon, Wednesday 15th August, I have an appointment with Durham Constabulary, at its headquarters at Aykley Heads.

To pursue my complaints against Tony Blair and Jack Straw arising out of the recent reports of the Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament.

And to pursue my complaints against the Leader of Durham County Council, Simon Henig, and the Director of Public Prosecutions, Alison Saunders, for malfeasance in public office, for conspiracy to pervert the course of justice, and for wasting Police time.

There is more evidence on which to arrest any of those four people than there has ever been against me.

Building The Picket Fence

But not sitting on it.

It looks as if I am going to be having some kind of meeting with the Police next week, so the picket of the MP's surgery on Saturday has been called off. 

All concerned have realised that my concerns and I are not going to go away. 

Very many thanks for so many messages of support. You know who you are, even when it is just as well that no one else does.

The Big Three-Oh

Think of a sum of money so small that you could afford to lose 30 times that much. Then please consider donating it for each of the following with which you agreed, in order to help to put me into the House of Commons for the area where I have lived since before I started school. There is going to be another hung Parliament, so one MP could make all the difference:

A Local, Experienced, Inclusive Candidate

Practical Policies

Traditional Values

A Local, Experienced, Inclusive Candidate

1. I was born in 1977, and I have lived in North West Durham since 1982. I never went to school anywhere else, and I went to university at Durham. I was an elected member of Lanchester Parish Council from 1999 to 2013, a governor (including a time as Vice Chair) of Lanchester Endowed Parochial Primary School from 1999 to 2007, and a governor of Saint Bede’s from 2000 to 2008. I am currently one of Derwentside’s elected public governors of County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust; to the best of my knowledge, I am the only person ever to have been elected to that Council of Governors unopposed. I have had several periods of involvement with Willow Burn Hospice over the last 25 years. I am both a product and a feature of the political pluralism of North West Durham, where Labour holds fewer than half of the County Council seats, where the Conservative parliamentary candidate won 34 per cent of the vote last year, where the Liberal Democrat candidate cut the Labour majority in half in 2010, and where an Independent kept his deposit both in 2005 and in 2010. Wear Valley was controlled for a time by the Liberal Democrats, who remained numerous on it until its abolition. Derwentside was in practice controlled by an alliance between the Independents and that section of the local Labour Party which now supports my parliamentary candidacy; its Leader from that time, Councillor Alex Watson OBE, is one of my Campaign Patrons. My other Campaign Patron is Davey Ayre, a legendary local trade unionist. 

2. I would appoint an Independent, a Labourite, a Conservative and a Liberal Democrat in each of the County Wards, ideally including at least one person in each of the former District Wards, to work with me and with local people. I would also appoint a Policy Advisor from within each of the Independent, Labour, Conservative, and Liberal Democrat blocs, and I hereby offer first refusal on that Labour position to my old comrade Neil Fleming, who is now living here again after his time as Head of Press and Broadcasting for the Labour Party and as its London Regional Director. The price of my support for any Government in the coming hung Parliament would be the necessary support for a number of projects in each of the former District Wards equal to the former number of District Councillors, together with justice for the 472 Teaching Assistants whose pay Durham County Council had cut by 23 per cent, and together with the implementation of the plan for the rail service in the North of England that was recently advanced by well over 20 local and regional newspapers, most of which have never supported Labour, and only one of which did so last year. And yes, I do mean the price of my support for any Government. Even a Government that was headed by Jeremy Corbyn, whom I broadly, but not uncritically, support. Two of the three such projects in Lanchester would be the restoration of the full bus service and the construction of adequate flood defences, while one in Weardale would be the saving of the Sixth Form at Wolsingham. The present MP for North West Durham has appointed as her Political Advisor the man whose political advice led the Teaching Assistants to their present predicament.

3. I am now working with all of the non-Labour members of Durham County Council and with the trade unions, to bring Volkswagen’s production for the British market to County Durham after, or even before, Brexit. I am more than open to further suggestions along similar lines. Among many other things, this project will guarantee the financial future of the Durham Miners’ Gala and of the Durham Miners’ Hall. The absence of the County Council Labour Group is that Group’s own sorry fault. I unreservedly condemn the decision of that Group to award to the Kier Group, with its history of blacklisting, the contract to build the new headquarters of Durham County Council.

4. I strongly support the exploitation of the vast reserves of coal in this country and in this county. That, and the extension of civil nuclear power, are the means of delivering highly paid, highly skilled, high status, unionised jobs while securing independence from Arab oil, from Russian gas, and from coal that has been mined using child and slave labour. From North Korea, Donald Trump intends his dynasty to supply a dependent world with the coal of the Kim dynasty deep into the twenty-second century. Yet we have our own, right here under our feet. Horror stories about how coal was burned or mined in the Britain of the twentieth century have no relevance to the Britain of the twenty-first. At the same time, I am totally opposed to the open-casting of the Pont Valley or anywhere else, digging up hardly any coal while employing hardly anyone. On those same grounds, I am also totally opposed to fracking.

5. I would co-operate with people of all parties and none, in order to implement Theresa May’s original Prime Ministerial 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, 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, while returning to her world-leading record of work against human trafficking and modern slavery, not least now that slavery has returned to Libya.

6. As the Member of Parliament for North West Durham, my Westminster office would be a global centre for the broadly based opposition and alternative to neoliberal economic policy and to neoconservative foreign policy, strongly asserting that that opposition and that alternative were the real centre ground. My candidacy is already endorsed by Dr Philip M. Giraldi, Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, Washington, D.C.; former CIA counterterrorism specialist and military intelligence officer; and foreign policy advisor to the 2008 Presidential campaign of Ron Paul. It also endorsed by Dr Leon Hadar of Chevy Chase, Maryland, and of Tel Aviv, Israel; Contributing Editor of The American Conservative; Commentator, Quillette; Washington Correspondent and Columnist, The Business Times, Singapore; and foreign policy advisor to the 2008 Presidential campaign of Ron Paul.

Practical Policies

7. In central and local government until 1979, the Conservatives used to take housing at least as seriously as anyone else did. But since 1997, even Labour in government has failed miserably on this issue. We need a minimum of 100,000 new homes every year for at least 10 years, including council homes with an end to the Right to Buy, with the capital receipts from council house sales released in order to build more council housing, and with councils empowered to borrow to that end. We need a minimum of 50 per cent of any new development to be dedicated to affordable housing, with affordability defined as 50 per cent of average rents. We need rent controls. We need action against the buying up of property by foreign investors in order to leave it empty. And we need a statutory requirement of planning permission for change of use if it were proposed to turn a primary dwelling into a secondary dwelling, a working family home into a weekend or holiday home. That would set the pattern for the empowerment of the rural working class, assisted both by the Land Value Tax and by a windfall tax on the supermarkets in order to fund agriculture and small business, with strict regulation to ensure that the costs of this were not passed on to suppliers, workers, consumers, communities, or the environment. 

8. Like the huge majority of the population across all political allegiances, and like so conservative a figure as Peter Hitchens of the Mail on Sunday, I support the renationalisation of the rail services as each franchise came up for renewal, and thus at no cost. I would make that the backbone of a rebuilt network of public transport, eventually free at the point of use, and extending to every village in this or any other constituency. Even prior to that, I would require the approval of the House of Commons for any increase in public transport fares, with the cost of HS2 diverted to reconnecting many towns to the rail network. That would include several towns in North West Durham. I was the first person ever to suggest that the trade unions develop an app in competition with Uber, and that is now developing well in the form of CabFair, an example of the key role of the unions in the mutualisation of the gig economy. Being disabled, I am dependent on public transport. I appreciate that a Member of Parliament for a rural constituency could never be entirely so, no matter how good that transport was, so I would create employment in North West Durham by employing one or more drivers. Vehicle Excise Duty does not really raise very much money at all, but it colours the debate on transport, so it ought to be abolished.

9. Privatised utilities are a racket. The same product, via the same wires or pipes, cannot possibly cost different amounts from different companies. Never mind from the same company, but on different tariffs. The utilities are currently delivered by cartels of pretend-competitors, instead of being where they belong, in public ownership. No one can claim to be patriotic or conservative while supporting the ownership of key parts of our national infrastructure by foreign states as such, and that is the result of privatisation. The “Royal” in “Royal Mail” now refers to the Emir of Kuwait, and the larceny of the Royal Mail cries out for a criminal investigation. As one benefit of a return to public ownership, I would insist on a National Grid for water. As another, I would insist on the requirement of the approval of the House of Commons before energy or water prices could be increased.

10. The creation of the National Health Service was in all three of the Labour, Conservative and Liberal manifestos in 1945. Even Margaret Thatcher barely touched it. It took New Labour and the Coalition to privatise much of it, and to grind down the rest with a view to a cheap sale, a process that is still very much ongoing. Instead of that, I support the enactment of the NHS Reinstatement Bill, the abolition of prescription charges throughout the United Kingdom, the abolition of eye and dental charges throughout the United Kingdom, the abolition of hospital car parking charges throughout the United Kingdom, the extra £350 million per week that was promised after Brexit, the diversion of funds to the ethically unproblematic research on adult and cord blood stem cells that is delivering the goods in spite of criminal neglect, and the invitation of the Cuban medical missions to make up for the running down of the National Health Service, beginning in the two STP areas that cover County Durham. The Fifth of July, which is the anniversary of the creation of the National Health Service, ought to be the United Kingdom’s National Day, and it ought to be marked as fulsomely as the United States marked the Fourth of July.

11. The National Education Service proposed by Jeremy Corbyn and Angela Rayner is, with the Build It In Britain programme, the National Investment Bank, the Regional Development Banks, and the Universal Basic Income, pretty much my dream policy. In Rayner’s inspiring words, “The sum of human knowledge is the fruit of thousands of years of human labour. The discoveries of maths and science; the great works of literature and art; the arc of human and natural history itself; and so much more that there is to learn. All of it should be our common inheritance. Because knowledge belongs to the many, not the few. This is our historic purpose as a movement. Not just to be a voice for the voiceless. But to give them a voice of their own.” Within that, I would work with all my might to ensure that apprentices and trainees enjoyed the same benefits as were enjoyed by their peers in further and higher education, and vice versa, while promoting the understanding that we either funded higher education all the way up to doctoral level or we charged fees at every stage (with a very strong preference for the former), and while guaranteeing that the training and other standards for the private sector to match were set by national and municipal public ownership, itself reformed towards greater democracy and accountability.

12. The condition of a commercial school’s continuing charitable status should be its having been adjudged good or better by Ofsted, using the same criteria as for state schools, with the reports published, and with the value-added measure applied, thereby requiring those schools to have demonstrated how they had improved pupils’ abilities. At the same time, I fully recognise that those schools regularly provide left-wing figures with a platform that they are seldom or never afforded by the schools that are under the direct or indirect control of the municipal Labour Right. The Left and the working class, and perhaps especially the rural working class, need to bypass both the municipal Labour Right and the Liberal Establishment both in education and in the media. The EU referendum result has confirmed that the workers, and not the liberal bourgeoisie, are now the key swing voters who deserve direct representation on local public bodies, on national public bodies, in the media, and at the intersection of the public and media sectors in the Parliamentary Lobby, in the BBC, in any future structure of the Channel Four Television Corporation, and in any arrangement that made possible Rupert Murdoch’s or anyone else’s acquisition of the whole of Sky News. I do not understand why people have fits of the vapours about Murdoch, as if any of the rest of them were any better. 

13. This is one of the areas the votes of which decided the EU referendum. We voted to reject 39 years of failure under all three parties, going all the way back to the adoption of monetarism by the Callaghan Government in 1977, the year of my birth. Brexit needs to meet our needs, which are not for chasing after the unicorns of the “Anglosphere” (what were once the Dominions have moved on, and anti-British protectionism is America’s historical norm), but for trade deals with the BRICS countries even while remaining thoroughly critical of their present governments, for integration into the Belt and Road Initiative, for full enjoyment of our freedom from the Single Market’s bans on such measures as State Aid and capital controls, for an extra £350 million per week for the National Health Service, and for the restoration of the United Kingdom’s historic fishing rights in accordance with international law: 200 miles, or to the median line. The Government’s proposals represent the only thing worse than staying in the EU, namely becoming a rule-taker but not a rule-maker, and paying while having no say, so that Britain would be reduced to a colony and a satrapy. In a referendum between that and Remain, then even Remain would be preferable. But the key is to stop matters from ever making it that far. I am by no means opposed in principle to trade deals with the United States, Canada, Australia or New Zealand, but the National Health Service and food safety standards are among the things that are simply not negotiable.

14. I would insist on the specification in the Statute Law 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, but with the money thus saved remaining within the budget of the Department for International Development, and with the 0.7 per cent target still resolutely intact.

15. As the Member of Parliament for North West Durham, my Westminster office would be an international centre for Modern Monetary Theory. The right-wing question is perfectly necessary in itself: where is the money for left-wing projects expected to come from? Modern Monetary Theory answers that question. Through its Jobs Guarantee, Modern Monetary Theory provides a way of preserving the bargaining power of the trade unions, through full employment with the Living Wage, while progressing to the Universal Basic Income that is increasingly favoured across the political spectrum. I warmly welcome the additional billion pound investment in jobs and services in Northern Ireland, and I would insist that Scotland, Wales, and each of the nine English regions receive the same per capita as part of the application of Modern Monetary Theory, including the Land Value Tax. I support the integration into the Belt and Road Initiative 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. In some way, all 99 lieutenancy areas, including County Durham, need to be so integrated, and need to receive such additional investment.

16. I would demand 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 I would demand the assertion of democratic political control over the City of London, with a Glass-Steagall division between investment banking and retail banking. I would close all tax havens under British jurisdiction, since they have the option of independence if they did not like it. The entire concept of non-domiciled tax status must be abolished. As a member of the House of Commons, I would campaign most actively for supporters of economic equality to be elected to the City of London Corporation, to the States of Jersey, to the States of Guernsey, to Tynwald, and to the legislatures of the British Overseas Territories. Rather than taxing income from work at a higher rate than income from share dividends or from capital gains, all income must be taxed on the same basis, as was the case under Margaret Thatcher. Employment rights must begin with employment, and apply regardless of the number of hours worked, as was promised by John Smith, but as was never implemented by New Labour.

17. I would replace the House of Lords with a Senate based on the 99 lieutenancy areas, including County Durham. Each of us would vote for one candidate, and the top six would be elected, giving 594 Senators in all, serving for six years. I would transfer all non-ceremonial exercises of the Royal Prerogative, including Royal Assent, to six, seven, eight or nine of nine Co-Presidents, with each of us voting for one candidate, and with the top nine elected to hold office for eight years. The term of office of the House of Commons ought to go back down to four years. If the number of Commons constituencies were indeed to be reduced to 600, then the number of MPs might nevertheless remain the same. The whole country should elect 50 MPs, with each of us voting for one candidate, and with the top 50 elected at the end. The House of Commons would revert to a four-year term. While the House of Lords exists, however, I actively encourage applications to its Appointments Commission, and the acceptance of offers of peerages, because even if our people did not take seats on the red benches, someone else would.

18. There must be no British military intervention except in a specific British national interest and with the approval of the House of Commons. We need an end to this country’s poisonous relationship with Saudi Arabia and with the other Gulf monarchies. We need withdrawal from NATO, which commits us to the defence of Turkish Islamists and of Eastern European neo-Nazis while charging us two per cent of our Gross Domestic Product for the privilege. We need bilateral peace treaties with all other European countries including Russia, we need bilateral peace treaties with the United States and with Canada, and we need peace treaties with the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and with the Collective Security Treaty Organisation. There must be no foreign military bases on British soil.

19. We need the renationalisation of BAE Systems as the monopoly supplier to our own Armed Forces, with a ban on all sale of arms abroad, and with a comprehensive programme of diversification in order to preserve the skills that were currently employed in the arms industry. We need the cancellation of Trident in favour of rebuilding the conventional Armed Forces, in favour of care for veterans, in favour of flood defences, and in favour of an “all of the above” energy policy based around civil nuclear power and around this country’s vast reserves of coal, with the commanding heights in reformed public ownership, with no need for fracking even in its own terms, and with the requirement of the approval of the House of Commons before energy or water prices could be increased. In the case of Trident, we could pay the affected shipyard workers quite eye-watering sums in compensation, and still save amounts that there were scarcely the adjectives to describe.

20. I am not a member of the same political party as Tony Blair, and in fact I am actively pursuing a complaint to the Police about him in relation to his complicity in torture, which was recently exposed by the Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament. A Chambers and Partners Band 1 legal practice is now on standby to pursue an action to bring about a Coroner’s Inquest into the death of Dr David Kelly, an action before the International Criminal Court against those who had brought slavery back to Libya, and an action before the High Court of Justiciary of Scotland inviting it to exercise its declaratory power against Tony Blair and his accomplices in the aggression against Iraq in 2003. All of these actions are to begin immediately upon my election to the House of Commons. As are the actions to bring about a Coroner’s Inquest into the death of Dawn Sturgess, and to challenge the legality of the recent bombing of Syria after the confirmation by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons that no nerve agent had been used at Douma. The present British funding of the White Helmets and of the “Free Syrian Police” must be diverted to our own emergency services.

Traditional Values 

21. I reject the ludicrous theory of gender self-identification, and I will fight to my last breath to defend women-only spaces. I seek to rescue such issues as male suicide, men’s health, and fathers’ rights from those whose economic and other policies have caused the problems in the first place. As a mixed-race person, I refuse to recognise racists, Fascists or opportunists as the authentic voices of the accepted need to control immigration, a problem that has arisen as a result of the weakening of trade unions. I deny the anti-racist credentials of the present MP for North West Durham, who has failed to move that Anne Marie Morris be expelled from the House of Commons for using language that would now be career-ending in South Africa or in the Southern United States.

22. We need an approach to climate change which protected and extended secure employment with civilised wages and working conditions, which encouraged economic development around the world, which upheld the right of the working classes and of nonwhite people to have children, which held down and as far as practicable reduced the fuel prices that always hit the poor hardest, and which refused to restrict travel opportunities or a full diet to the rich. I reject out of hand the notion that the problem with the world is that it has people in it. Instead, we must celebrate 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. That expansion and development must now include space exploration, perhaps fuelled by, and fuelling, fusion power.

23. I have spent more than 20 years, since I was just about still in my teens and had never seen the Internet, trying to get the story out about Harriet Harman and the Paedophile Information Exchange. I have paid a terrible journalistic and political price for it, but I have no regrets. Media that always knew about it simply ignored the whole thing, banning me from their websites and what have you, until a period of no more than two weeks when they needed to distract attention from Patrick Rock. Normal service was rapidly resumed, and it has continued ever since. No one has done more on this issue than I have. No one. And now, the plan is advancing to make Harman the next Speaker of the House of Commons. Not only would I oppose her election, but, were she already in post, then I would oppose her re-election at the start of the next Parliament. As I have been proved right about Harman and the Paedophile Information Exchange, so I am being proved right about the rise of the Far Right. These matters are not unconnected. For example, we are enduring the rehabilitation of Toby Young, who is a eugenicist of international importance, who is also a self-confessed sexual assailant and supplier of Class A drugs, and whose involvement in eugenics has made him an associate of Emil Kirkegaard, himself an advocate of the rape of drugged children. Like Kirkegaard, Young is a a stalwart of the world of the London Conference on Intelligence, the Ulster Institute for Social Research and the Mankind Quarterly, yet he was given a loud voice in education policy for many years, a major formal role in education was about to have been given to him, and he is even now being brought back into public life. I was proved right about Harman, and I am being proved right again.

24. “Nutrition” is just a Latin way of saying “food”, and “hydration” is just a Greek way of saying “water”. The withdrawal of food and water is not the withdrawal of medical treatment. It is the intentional killing of that person. Parliament needs to legislate in order to make that clear. My commitment to palliative care and to the hospice movement is absolute. I would also give the highest priority to the diversion of funds to the ethically unproblematic research on adult and cord blood stem cells that is delivering the goods in spite of criminal neglect.

25. We need to ban Fixed Odds Betting Terminals, to empower local authorities to limit the number of gambling venues, to insist on the use of that power, to end gambling on television, to end the advertising of gambling other than at venues such as casinos and betting shops, and to ban gambling with credit cards. And 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. Most certainly, that must 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. I have never taken any illegal drug. Radical change would be impossible if the workers, the youth and the poor were in a state of stupefaction, and that baleful situation, which has been contrived in the past, is being contrived again today.

26. Families need fathers. All aspects of public policy must take account of the urgent social and cultural need for highly paid, highly skilled, high status employment, which only the State can ever guarantee and which only the State can very often deliver, as 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. We need a legal presumption of equal parenting. We need the restoration of the tax allowance for fathers for so long as Child Benefit was being paid to mothers. We need the restoration of the requirement that providers of fertility treatment take account of the child’s need for a father. We need to repeal of the ludicrous provision for two persons of the same sex to be listed as a child’s parents on a birth certificate. We need paternity leave to be made available up to a set maximum at any time until the child was 18 or left school. And we need a foreign policy that did not entail tearing fathers away from their children in order to harvest them in wars.

27. We need to give any marrying couple the right to register their marriage as bound by the law prior to 1969 with regard to grounds and procedures for divorce, and any religious organisation the right to specify that any marriage that it conducted would be so bound, requiring it to counsel couples accordingly. We need to fix entitlement upon divorce 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. And we need to give opposite-sex couples the right to contract civil partnerships, removing the restriction of civil partnerships to unrelated couples.

28. We need to halt and reverse the proliferation of lap-dancing clubs, and we need to apply the technology that is already used for age verification in order to block pornographic websites altogether. We need to make it a criminal offence for anyone aged 21 or over to buy or sell sex, with equal sentencing on both sides. We need to define obscenity as material depicting acts that were themselves illegal or which was reasonably likely to incite or encourage such acts, with sentencing the same as for the illegal act in question in each case. We need a criminal offence of sexual activity with any person under the age of 18 who was more than two years younger than oneself, with a maximum sentence equal to twice the difference in age, abolition of different rules for “positions of trust” and for one sex rather than the other, a ban on abortion or contraception for those under 18 without parental knowledge and consent, and the application of the law on indecent images equally to boys and to girls. We need the removal of any financial liability of male victims for pregnancies resulting from their sexual abuse unless they decided as adults to seek to make contact with their children. We need the replacement of the existing categories of sexual assault with aggravating circumstances to the general categories of offences against the person such that the sentences could be doubled. There must be no anonymity either for adult defendants or for adult complainants. We need to reverse even the existing reversal of the burden of proof, rule out the legal possibility of being a specifically sexual assailant below the age of consent, and specify that intoxication was a bar to sexual consent only insofar as it would have been a bar to driving. We need to outlaw American-style internally administered “balance of probabilities” or “preponderance of evidence” tests to sexual assault allegations at universities or elsewhere, outlaw extradition to face charges that fell short of these standards, and exclude such convictions from any legal standing in this country. And we need to end the practice whereby the Police and others blocked people’s progress into paid or voluntary work, even though they had been acquitted, by suggesting that they might have been guilty after all.

29. We need to reverse the erosion of trial by jury and of the right to silence, and we need to reverse the existing reversals of the burden of proof. We need the abolition of conviction by majority verdict, which, by definition, provides for conviction even where there is reasonable doubt. We need the extension throughout the United Kingdom of the Scots Law requirement for corroborating evidence. We need to require that the prosecution present its case within 12 weeks of charge, or else that case be dismissed. We need the abolition of the Crown Prosecution Service, so that the decision as to whether or not to charge should be made the Police, while any high street firm of solicitors would have a partner whose specialisms included prosecution, with such work built into the firm’s ordinary caseload. We need the restoration of the pre-1968 committal powers of the magistracy. We need the abolition of the admission of anonymous evidence other than from undercover Police Officers. We need the exclusion of the possibility of conviction on anonymous evidence alone. We need the restoration of the provision that no acquitted person should ever have to stand trial again for the same offence, since the previous change to this has now done its job in the Stephen Lawrence case. We need an end to the secrecy of the family courts. We need the exclusion of identity cards or any thought of them, and the exclusion of control orders or anything like them. We need the abolition of Police confiscation of assets without a conviction. We need the abolition of stipendiary magistrates sitting alone. We need the repeal of the Civil Contingencies Act, the repeal of the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Act, and the repeal of the Official Secrets Acts. We need the repeal of one-sided extradition arrangements. We need the repeal of the provision for “no win, no fee” litigation. We need the restoration and extension of Legal Aid. We need the enactment of the current judicially imposed arrangement on privacy into the Statute Law, with the placing of the burden of proof in libel actions onto the plaintiff, and with the extension of Legal Aid to defamation actions. We need a return to preventative policing based on foot patrols, with Police Forces at least no larger than at present, and with the restoration of the network of police stations and police houses that placed the Police at the very heart of their communities. And we need the disbandment of MI5 in favour Police Officers who, while highly specialised, were nevertheless part of accountable community policing. 

30. I am actively involved in campaigns for truth and justice as various, and yet as inseparable from each other, as Hillsborough, Shrewsbury, Orgreave, Grenfell Tower, blacklisting, spycops, Farepak, Remploy, the Mineworkers’ Pension Scheme, George Bell, Julian Assange, the Miami Showband massacre, the Marikana massacre, support for the Dalits, support for the Rohingya and other minorities in Myanmar, support for the Chagossians, support for Abdullah Öcalan and the wider Kurdish cause, support for the deportation of Altaf Hussain to Pakistan, support for an inquiry into the role of the Thatcher Government in the 1984 storming of the Golden Temple and in the events surrounding it, support for the Dorje Shugden practitioners who are being persecuted by the Dalai Lama, support for the Russian and other ethnic minorities who are oppressed in the Baltic States, support for the ancient indigenous Christians of the Middle East and North Africa (and not least of the Holy Land), support for those in Israel who are opposed to the apartheid Nation-State Law, support for British Jews who do not identify as Zionists primarily or at all, support for the Jews and Zoroastrians of Iran, and the translation into English and the publication in the United Kingdom of Hernán Dobry’s Operation Israel: The Rearming of Argentina During the Dictatorship, 1976-1983. As the Member of Parliament for North West Durham, I would board a plane to Tehran and simply refuse to leave without Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and Abbas Edalat. My Westminster office would be a global centre for the coordination of these and numerous other campaigns for truth and justice at home and abroad.

I need £10,000 in order to stand for Parliament with any chance of winning. My crowdfunding page is here, or email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com for other options. That address accepts PayPal.

Action This Day

Just sent to the Crown Prosecution Service, copied to my solicitor and to numerous journalists:

Dear Sir or Madam,

Today, it is 16 weeks, four months, one third of year, since the more recent of my “postponed” trial dates. There is no dispute that there has never been any intention of putting me on trial. The action, and even what might now be called the constructive inaction, against me has never had any motivation except to silence me politically. In that, it has been, and it remains, an abject failure. Therefore, I now demand, demand, that you notify me by five o’clock this Friday afternoon, 3rd August 2018, that there will be no further action against me, and that all relevant files have been closed. Otherwise, I reserve the right to take all available action within the law.

Yours faithfully,

David Lindsay

Tommy The Who?

Although he would presumably have to use his real name, Tommy Robinson will contest the North West Durham parliamentary seat against me. Or my election literature will make great play of the fact that he had chickened out of doing so, right here in the Pakistan of the white working class. The choice is his.

I need £10,000 in order to stand for Parliament with any chance of winning. My crowdfunding page has been taken down without my knowledge or consent But you can still email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com instead, and that address accepts PayPal.

Drawing The Picket Line

On Monday 2nd July, I wrote to Durham Constabulary to report formally the numerous criminal offences that had been committed by (at the time that they took place) the then Prime Minister Tony Blair, by the then Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, and by a large number of others, as set out in the previous week’s reports of the Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament into the treatment of detainees and into the involvement of British agencies in the practice of rendition.

On Saturday 21st July, I wrote to Durham Constabulary to report formally the malfeasance in public office, the conspiracy to pervert the course of justice, and the wasting of Police time, that had been committed against me by the Leader of Durham County Council, The Honourable Councillor Dr Simon Henig CBE, and by the outgoing Director of Public Prosecutions, Mrs Alison Saunders CB.

I regret to have to say that I have still yet to receive a crime number for either of those complaints. If that remains the case on Saturday 11th August at 3:30pm, then I shall picket the surgery that is to be held at Croft View Hall in Lanchester on behalf of Laura Pidcock MP. In that event, I invite you to join me, and indeed I look forward to seeing you there.