However Dressed Up Or Dressed Down

This was sent on Tuesday, just before the sky fell in. Newspapers do not always put letters on their websites, so I do not know whether or not it has appeared anywhere. But here it is:

The Customs Union locks out food and other produce from the developing world. It would prevent us, as it does now, from enacting anti-dumping laws in order to protect the British steel and other industries. It would forbid, as it does now, individual trade deals with the BRICS and other countries, including the desperately necessary integration of every part of this country into the Belt and Road Initiative.

Yet by the end of this week, however dressed up or dressed down, membership of the Customs Union will be the policy of both parties. [If that has not come to pass today, then why is Anna Soubry so pleased?] The Labour MP here at North West Durham, a solidly Leave-voting area, is not merely a broad supporter of Jeremy Corbyn’s. As we have already seen in relation to his words without actions on the issue of Durham County Council’s Teaching Assistants, she is an uncritical supporter of Jeremy Corbyn’s.

Whereas I am as opposed to the Customs Union as Corbyn was this time last week, and as Tony Benn was to his dying day. I am also totally committed to justice for the Teaching Assistants, 472 of whom have had their incomes cut by 23 per cent. They are now paid less to work full-time with children than the Councillors are paid for no formal requirement beyond attendance at four meetings per year. The TAs have been reduced to that position because of the political advice of the man who is now the Political Advisor to the MP for North West Durham.

There could be a General Election this year, and whenever there is one, then it is going to result either in a hung Parliament or in a tiny overall majority. I humbly ask you and your readers for support as the Independent parliamentary candidate for North West Durham. I can be contacted on davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. 

To which, today, I can only add this: Laura Pidcock, do you accept the endorsement of Michael Heseltine, who finished off Margaret Thatcher’s destruction of the Durham coal industry, and who recently said that the former Durham coalfield was now better off as a result? Yes or No, Laura? Yes or No?