As of today, my parliamentary candidacy at North West Durham has been resumed. Not that it ever really stopped. It now incorporates a challenge to either or both of my accusers to stand against me. I have already had the moral victory over them, since they have failed in their attempt to force me to commit suicide. In this age of Keir Starmer, David Evans and Assaf Kaplan, then one of them could have the Labour nomination for the asking.
Although unless you are Holy Weeking the old-fashioned way, or even if you are, then raise a glass tonight to the deceased credibility of my oldest and bitterest enemy, who once thought that he was going to be Prime Minister, but who now stands exposed as a delicate flower on the fainting couch, his preciousness matched only by his petulance. It is impossible to see how anyone will ever take him seriously again. I have been ahead of that game by 20 years, since I never, ever have taken him seriously.
Not that either Precious or my other accuser is my reason for returning to the electoral fray. The margin of victory at North West Durham was 1,144. With three years’ notice, then I could take more votes than that. More than the margin of victory between the Conservatives and Labour, or vice versa. Of course I could. The Brexit Party no longer exists, and Watts Stelling is very unlikely to give it a fourth go, in his seventies. The de facto Conservative majority is therefore about five thousand. It might still be worth a punt, though.
A punt to strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty. To build on Brexit as a double opportunity, both to reorganise the British economy under the direction of a more democratic State, and to develop a fully independent and a peaceable British foreign policy.
To exercise the leading role in the pursuit of economic equality of those who suffered most from its absence, namely the working class, and the leading role in the pursuit of international peace of those who suffered most from its absence, namely the working class and the youth, insisting that the working class in Great Britain was indivisible. (The Northern Independence Party is an intentional joke. A whippet as its emblem? Really?)
To celebrate the fact that Britain was ethnically diverse down to every ward, that Britain was home to people from every inhabited territory, that Britain had a large and growing population of mixed ethnic heritage, and that Britain was therefore the world centre of the liberation struggle of the Global South, accepting no definition of anti-Semitism beyond, “Hostility to or prejudice against Jews.” To use that celebration against the central role of the City of London, and of its network of tax havens under British sovereignty, in the oppression of the Global South.
To insist on 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 people of colour 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.
And to reverse deindustrialisation at home, while bringing an end to the harvesting of young men in endless and pointless wars abroad, as two of the many policy implications of the scientific fact of binary and immutable biological sex, implications that also included action on men’s health and on fathers’ rights. (There is no “rape culture” in schools that have barely been open in a year. Teenagers have bad sex, and they often regret it.)
This list is not exhaustive.
As to today, it turns out that there is no defence to a charge of harassment. If someone is prepared to testify that she perceives herself to have been harassed, then the magistrate is obliged to convict. How very carceral and statist feminism has become, demanding endless new criminal offences of which it was impossible to be acquitted and which carried draconian sentences. The liberation movement that exists to have men locked up on the mere say-so of women. Or, in this case, of a woman and of an old woman. But the law as written does not specify sex, and two can play that game.
My guilty pleas today are the law, because acquittal of the charges on the sheet was by definition impossible. But they are nothing more than that. My guilt is actively disbelieved by the people on whose respect depends the ability of one my accusers to do her job, but that job was how she knew about the existence of a criminal offence of which mere accusation was conviction.
Although just how common are acquittals these days? Someone needs to look into that. Proponents of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill are among those who need to consider that the only function of the courts in this country is for the State to convict and sentence the people whom the State had charged. Your chance of being found not guilty is effectively nil, and there are charges acquittal of which is impossible because the law has been written that way.
Add to that this morning’s revelation, at least to me, that a suspended sentence could be activated by conviction, even in the form of a guilty plea, of an offence that had occurred before that sentence had been imposed, or even before the trial that had occasioned that sentence. Specifically, it can be so activated by a guilty plea to a charge of which acquittal was impossible. As of today, my parliamentary candidacy at North West Durham has been resumed.
