The Protocols of New Labour

My recent observation that I thought the Labour Party a conspiracy against the people of this country caused a minor ripple on Twitter.  I’m inspired, inspired to make the indictment even heavier by reviving a piece I wrote a couple of years ago. 

What follows is an imaginary document (it is, isn’t it?), an agenda for Britain by the Labour Party, based, of course, on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, another infamous forgery about a supposed conspiracy. The difference is that the elements, the substantive elements, are all drawn from real history, past happenings and, from the date of the document, coming events. What about the conspiracy element? Well, I leave that for you to decide. :-)

Dismantling Britain

London, sometime in the winter of 1996.

Comrades, let me summarise the main points of our discussion and the elements of our agreed strategy. There has to be an election in the coming year, so we must be ready with the most effective programme possible. Also, comrades, none of this will go into our published manifesto. Let me remind you that you are all pledged to absolute secrecy.

Past Achievements

1.1 Ever since it was founded at the beginning of this century our Labour Party has been pledged to the destruction of Britain and the British way of life. We have approached this task in various ways. Before the Second World War our governments were too weak, too dependent on the good will of the then Liberal Party, to do any real damage. Something might possibly have come out from the partial victory of 1929 if it had not been for the treason of Ramsay Macdonald, joining in the National Government with the terrible Tories. For the nation is something we hate. The pacifism we supported certainly went a long way towards ensuring the country was not ready for war in 1939, but not nearly far enough.

1.2 We had a great victory in 1945 and made much of it under the guidance of Comrades Atlee and Bevan. The best way to ensure that the country would be ill-prepared for the future, for competition with the other capitalist states, was to start spending money it did not have on welfare programmes that it could not afford. How stupid our enemies were not to recognise how clever we were in building a Welfare State in a bankrupt country! How much more we could have achieved if Comrade Atlee had not lost his nerve and went for a general election in 1951. The Tories managed to reverse some of our damage, though we still made real gains on the road to ruin, massive public spending based on an economy that depended in a large part on dying and antiquated industries. Our comrades in the Trade Unions offered us valuable support here.

1.3 Our next period in office from 1964 to 1970 also saw positive achievements. Some comrades made useful and lasting contacts with the comrade communists in the Soviet Union as part of our secret foreign policy programme. Information was exchanged and deals done. Comrade Jack Jones of the Transport and General Workers Union performed some valuable services here, both as a paid-up agent of the KGB and as a sponsor of new MPs in trade union rotten boroughs. Comrades Blair and Brown were eventually to benefit from this union sponsorship. Comrade Wilson, our Prime Minister, pretended to be renewing the economy and reforming ‘outmoded’ trade union practices; but the economy just got weaker and the unions stronger.

1.4. More good work was done in our next period of government from 1974 to 1979, especially in the creation of ruinous levels of inflation, helped along by deals with the trade union dons. But things were still not moving fast enough; Britain was proving more resilient than we expected. Then came the disaster of 1979; then came Margaret Thatcher, the devil incarnate, who set about ruing all of our best achievements. We came close, but not close enough. We have to try harder, accelerate our programme in such a way that no future Thatcher will be able to reverse our work.

Future Strategy

We are now prepared for government, for victory in the election of 1997. These are the chief elements we must work on.

a. Devolution. Scotland and Wales must be given a parliament, in the case of the former, and an assembly, in the case of the latter. It was a mistake, comrades, to oppose devolution in the past, for this is the best way of beginning the end of Britain and the best way of isolating England. Don’t worry, comrades; in the short term we will still have the support of the bloc Labour vote from Scotland and Wales at Westminster, though English Tories will have no input into the affairs of these nations. A brilliant tactic. In the long term it will not matter what happens in England or what the English think for, you see, there will be no more England, which leads on to the second main feature of our master plan.

b. Europe. We shall accelerate the death of Parliament in England by giving away more and more powers to the European Union. We shall pretend to be opposed to any major political changes in Europe, changes of a constitutional nature, while advancing these as fast as we can. One element here is to pretend to allow the people to have a say in such matters and then, when our goals are within reach, change our minds. This approach might be used just prior to a future election. Westminster shall become increasingly irrelevant in peoples lives; England shall become increasingly irrelevant. Indeed, our third major strategy will make it difficult for people in future even to define Englishness.

c. Mass Immigration. We will open the doors. We will allow everyone in, whether there is economic cause or not, diluting the native English stock in a new multi-cultural utopia. We shall denounce all words of caution as racist, thus silencing debate. When we are finished it will be impossible to reverse the trend. This may very well lead to new forms of extremism in our old heartlands, as voters feel more and more alienated, a danger, yes, but such a process will help us forward by leading to the further fragmentation of England.

d. The Economy. Comrade Brown, whom Comrade Blair intends to appoint as Chancellor of the Exchequer, has excellent plans for laying the foundations of economic ruin by deregulating the banking sector - killing capitalism by its own devices - and by building a credit-fuelled boom, which will take the nation deeper and deeper into unsupportable levels of debt, public debt and private debt.

Summary

It is our earnest hope comrades that we win not just the coming election but the election after that and the election after that. It is our hope that we win and win. After twelve years or so people will no longer recognise this country, recognise it for what it once was. But I repeat, comrades, secrecy must be maintained. Only by that will the Elders of Labour emerge triumphant. Triumphant indeed.

Polly of the Manor; a tale of Modern Labour

The Lady of the Socialist Manor

I’ve been catching up with Dominic Sandbrook’s three-part telly series on Britain in the mid1970s on iPlayer.  It’s a visual accompaniment to his recently published Seasons in the Sun: The Battle for Britain, 1974-1979, which I acquired fairly recently, opened, skimmed but yet to read properly. 

I admire Sandbrook as a social historian; I have ever since I read State of Emergency-the Way We Were: Britain, 1970-1974, which I reviewed here some time ago (A Tale Unfolds, 21 October, 2010).  He has a nice relaxed style, a wonderful attention to detail and a witty and perceptive way of looking at the issues of the day, be it political, artistic, sporting or cultural.  There was something he said in the final episode of his present series, something touching on the Labour Party, that immediately set a train of thought in motion, ending in an amusing – and frustrating - terminus.

Actually, it wasn’t really about the Labour Party at all; it was about Margaret Thatcher.  It was simply that she wasn’t such a great innovator but she had a unique quality in a politician – she had the ability to listen.  More than that she translated what she heard into policy. 

The big issue here concerns the sale of state-owned council housing, generally believed to be one of the great flag ship policies of the first Thatcher administration.  But this was nothing new; senior figures in the Labour Party had even flirted with such a move after it became evident, from doorstep canvassing, that it would be enormously popular with ordinary working-class voters, many of whom were anxious to join the property owning democracy. 

But it never went beyond an idea, because it was generally understood that such heresy would be blocked by the left, who believe in managed people and managed lives.  Thus it was, according to Sandbrook, that the ideological high priests of Labour effectively handed victory to Thatcher in 1979, pledged to set the people free from council serfdom.  Irony of ironies: Thatcherism was a new Peasants’ Revolt! 

I’ve just come up with the serfdom analogy as I was writing.  My original focus was on nineteenth century novels which touch on issues of class, specifically those which deal with forms of noblesse oblige.  I’m thinking specifically of the work of Jane Austen, where one of the chief pastimes of gentlewomen is to deliver baskets to the parish poor; mercy, charity and condescension all rolled up in one!

That’s it; that’s the modern Labour Party, condescending and patronising in its attitude to the ‘deserving’ poor.  The Islington socialite socialists are the contemporary version of the likes of Emma Wodehouse.  Here the awful Polly Toynbee must stand as an avatar, walking around the homes of the lower orders, wearing her bonnet of self-righteousness and carrying her basket of doles, a perfect fright of snobbish condescension.  

It’s all a huge joke, of course, though like all good jokes it carries a hard core of truth.  Quite frankly I think the Labour Party is a criminal conspiracy against the people of this country.  The last government did untold damage, what with its aggressive wars abroad and its profligacy at home.  We will be paying for its incompetence for generations to come.

But the people who will pay most are this movement’s ‘natural’ constituency, the working class serfs living in council ghettos.  Gordon Brown, the previous Prime Minister, preached to them about ‘British jobs for British workers’, a sound bite of stunning stupidity, even for that charmless Presbyterian ogre.  The truth is he headed a government, as did Blair before him, that guaranteed a bonanza for foreign workers at the expense of the native British.

 I could take my historical parallels still further. I see a new form of the late Roman Empire.  All the work is done by a class of foreign helots, while the plebs are kept alive by bread, circuses, pot noodles, daytime telly and Simon Cowell.  Oh, yes, and there is the occasional basket of cant from the Polly of the Manor.  Why people vote for the Labour Party, why the non-labouring poor vote for it when they are treated with such condescension and contempt, is utterly beyond my comprehension. 

Kaa Livingstone

The one figure I admire above all others in the Conservative Party is Boris Johnson, the present Mayor of London. He is a clever, affable and self-assured chap. Beneath an occasionally bumbling exterior there is a shrewd mind at work. In contrast to Prime Minister David Cameron and Chancellor George Osborne, he is comfortable with who he is and where he has come from, carrying none of their exaggerated fears of appearing to be upper class ‘toffs.’ Boris is a toff and people love him just the same, or perhaps even more for his honesty! He is, as Nick Cohen wrote in an article last year, the Bertie Wooster of English political life.

This year he faces a fresh mayoral contest with Labour’s Ken Livingstone, the former incumbent defeated by Boris in the election of 2008. If Boris is Bertie, Livingston with his heavy eyelids and generally shifty appearance calls to mind another literary figure altogether – the Indian python Kaa as depicted in the 1967 Disney movie version of The Jungle Book. Last year he published his autobiography, You Can’t Say That. To this I respond I Won't Read That, but according to Cohen, whose judgement I trust, it’s verbose, self-pitying and petty, very much as I see Kaa Livingstone.

Livingstone is a perfect example of the idiocy of the left or the socialism of fools. This has seen supposedly ‘progressive’ elements carry out incredible ideological contortions to ally themselves with some of the most reactionary forces on earth. Yusaf al-Qaradi, spiritual guide for the Muslim Brotherhood, is a man, Kaa hisses, who is attempting to “reconcile Islam with democracy and human rights, in particular women’s rights.” As Cohen pointed out in the political journal Standpoint, he conveniently forgets to mention Qaradawi’s fatwas in favour of the genital mutilation of girls, wife beating, and the murder of gays, Jews and apostates.

Livingstone’s position here is even more hypocritical and disingenuous, for he also overlooks Qaradawis’s links with Jamaat-e-Islami, the far-right Islamist party, whose leaders stand accused of aiding and abetting the Pakistani army’s massacre of civilians during the Bangladeshi war of independence.

So this Kaa, the face of the London left, a face that looks with favour on the most obscurantist forms of fundamentalist opinion. I just hope, like Mowgli, the city evades his slimy grasp in the coming election. Better off with Bertie by far.

The Masque of Anarchy

Decent people did well to keep out of central London on Saturday as a ghastly mob exercised their right to ‘peaceful protest’ against the present government’s cuts (cuts; what cuts?). How much more convenient it would have been if they had marched across the English Channel, the waters helpfully parted by God. How much we would have benefited if, half way across, God had allowed the waters to close again, in a moment of ennui or perhaps exercising His own peaceful right to peace.

Just think how much this country would have saved if these tax eaters, dole recipients, holders of worthless public sector jobs (Assistant Deputy Chief Liaison Officer to the Disabled Black Lesbian Caucus); student nurses, ready to learn how to abuse the elderly in lethally dirty National Health Hospitals; teachers who teach nothing in state schools to pupils too stupid to learn anything; recipients of third rate degrees from fourth rate universities, the work-shy ‘workers’, ignorant and worthless people of all sorts, had disappeared for ever. Oh, I can always dream.

No, instead they exercised their right to ‘peaceful protest’ bringing violence and chaos to the streets of our capital, summoned there by the Trade Unions Council; summoned by the likes of Red Len McClusky, a lover of Cuba, Communism and Castro (what; no peaceful right to protest?), so repellent to look at with his thick nose and his heavy features that he would win any ugly man competition nem con.



Once this mob had gathered it was given the support of the Labour Party in the person of Ed Miliband, the leader of the opposition, a former member of a government, a criminally incompetent government, responsible for the financial morass this country is in at present. Oh, yes, however he may wish to distance himself from the thugs who rampaged along the city streets, sub-human orcs (sorry, I couldn’t resist that!) who relish destruction for the sake of destruction, his very presence was a spur, an indication of the true worth of his loathsome party. This rampage was planned months in advance, as a casual glance at Twitter and Facebook would have shown. Only an idiot would have failed to realise that a riot was in the offing. Oops, sorry, I’ve clearly given Ed a way out.



Only an idiot and the Metropolitan Police, apparently, who in their handling of the mayhem appeared more Keystone than ever, even more than they did in last year’s march against the increase in tuition fees. What the hell is going on? How much more pathetic can London’s police force become, not the ordinary officers, who had light bulbs filled with ammonia thrown at them, but the command, senior officers so anxious to be goody goody that that they invited civil liberties activists to monitor their softly softly approach. How are these idiots going to cope with the forthcoming royal wedding, another anarchist target?

On Saturday they probably took heed of Ugly Red Len’s admonition to keep their hands off “our kids”. I expect they planned a nice party with the anarchists, all sitting down and singing Kumbaya. What a pity it is that heads were not broken instead, what a pity that the ‘accidental’ mayhem was beamed across the world as ‘their kids’ behaved like the apes and troglodytes they are, what an impression others will have of England. How sorry I feel for the poor benighted tourists caught up in the sickening madness.

Does it get any worse? Yes, unfortunately it does. We have a government that pretends to cut public expenditure while increasing it in practice; we have a government that loses control of the nation’s capital while bombarding that of another; we have a government that last week sent six Storm Shadow rockets flying into Libya at a cost of £1million pounds ($1.4million) each. Yes, that’s quite right: £1million each! We have a government unable to read the intelligence properly, a government so besotted with ‘uman rights that it sees virtue in the ‘peaceful right to protest’ even when that ‘peaceful right’ is the prerogative of low class animals, the vermin of the inner city estates, trade unionists and other such creatures. I could suggest a better use for those rockets, another way of reclaiming the expense, just as efficacious as the waters of the Channel.

Last came Anarchy; he rode
On a white horse, splashed with blood;
He was pale even to the lips,
Like Death in the Apocalypse.

I’m just crackers about Ed!

I really love Wallace and Gromit, my favourite animation by far, one that absolutely delighted me when I was growing up: Wallace, an inventor in the Heath Robinson style, and Gromit, his wonderful dog. So it came as a bit of a shock when I looked at the Times on Saturday. There he is, Wallace himself in the paper’s main political cartoon on a student demonstration, except it’s not Wallace at all – it’s Ed Miliband, leader of the Labour Party! The really shocking thing is that he looks like Wallace, the same teeth, the same weird eyes.

I’ve been doing a quick spot of internet research and it’s now clear that the buzz on this goes back some way. During his victory speech at the Labour conference in September some commentators were already remarking on the resemblance. But it goes back even further than that. There is clearly a conspiracy at work; for, you see, Red Ed does not look like Wallace – he is Wallace!

I’m truly grateful to The Economic Voice for making me aware of The Facts in the Case of E Miliband. Writing for this gloriously informative online publication, Richard Henley Davis points out that the former minister for melting ice caps and light bulbs never appears on chat shows with Wallace because the two are one and the same. The information comes to him from a highly reliable source, Ian Rottweiler, a researcher for The Daily Something or Other;

Up until now Ed has managed to keep his true identity a secret by not making too many television appearances and ensuring no one can take a sample of his DNA, which he masks with a fake compulsive cleaning disorder. Mr Rottweiler who noticed his Mr Miliband’s strange ability to fall into a northern accent and his ability to invent useless objects on the spot was a clue that he was actually leading a double life so he decided to follow him for 3 months and stake out his house. However Ian was amazed when one night he watched as Ed’s moonlit silhouette appeared on the rooftop of his house riding a flying motorcycle and sidecar with wings attached.

Oh dear, another illusion gone, another hero dead. How will I cope? Well, I suppose I could drop my own secret identity as Tory Girl and follow Ed Wallace into the Labour Party. It’s so wonderfully bland these days, almost as bland as Wallace’s favourite cheese. But Ed is doing his best to give it just a spot of vim. Fronting student demonstrations, or not fronting student demonstrations, not being able to make up his mind one way the other, he recently announced that socialism is not a dirty word, that he intends to persuade the public that it is not a dirty word. I imagine he must have cleaned it up in one of his super machines.

Ed or Wallace, you take your pick, has a splendid socialist pedigree, the son of Ralph ‘if it shows any life at all nationalise it’ Miliband. Oh, but he does not think like dad; he does not want public ownership of everything; he simply wants to tackle the ‘big unfairnesses’, as he puts it, in our society.

That’s the odd thing about the Labour Party, about Labour governments, the more they talk about tackling the ‘big unfairnesses’ the bigger the unfairnesses seem to become. Life on a council estate, suffering bad health, rotting teeth, unemployed and on welfare, with no prospects at all, is this, I wonder, what is meant by a ‘big fairness’, a levelling down, perhaps? No?: well it’s all that Labour seems to offer so many of its benighted voters. After thirteen years of Blair and Brown it's all most of them got. But Ed Wallace is right: there are still too many ‘big unfairnesses’ as yet untouched, far too much free enterprise and unlicensed inventors, too many people wearing the wrong trousers.

Meanwhile Wallace or Ed, while you are thinking about the big fairnesses, I would really like an answer to that most perplexing question of all: what is wrong with Wensleydale? After all, there is no use prevaricating about the bush.

I’d rather have the Borg

I had a jolly good laugh last week with a friend of mine, an individual with some inside knowledge of the way politics work in this country. We were lunching together and in the course of our conversation happened to touch on the Labour Party, whose annual conference was still in progress, specifically on the leadership contest, in which Comrade Miliband beat Comrade Miliband, with some oddballs there for padding.

He’d seen my blog about the victor (Ed Miliband – Union Man) and said there was one thing that I had overlooked: that none of the contenders for the leadership seemed altogether human. I thought about it for a moment; yes, he had a point; what exactly are we dealing with here, I asked? They might be shaped from alien plant pods, he replied, the premise of an old movie called Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

And so the speculation went on, becoming jollier by rapid stages. We finally agreed that David Miliband, the comrade brother who lost to brother comrade, was a Vulcan; that he would fit well within a Star Trek script. Look at him closely; he has that air about him, an appearance at once human and at twice not! The only trouble is Vulcans are such jolly people, with an irrepressible sense of humour; they don’t speak and act like robots. Perhaps the Milibands along with Ed Balls, Diane Abbott and Andy Burnham, the also rans, might do better as the Borg. I can certainly see the Labour Party having a hive mind. Resistance is futile, the call goes out, we are the Borg; you will be assimilated.

It was such fun to watch them all in shades of red. In the 1830s, after the passing of the Reform Act, the duke of Wellington remarked of the new members in the House of Commons that he had never seen so many shocking bad hats in his life. Looking at the delegates of the Labour Party Conference, this assembly of the undead, there were not too many hats to be see but everything else was bad: I’ve never seen so many ugly fashions and shocking fat men in my life!

Red Ed the Borg came on stage, the new leader giving his inaugural address. What can one say, other than that a real Borg, not a pretend one, not a phony like this, would have done it so much better. Cometh the hour cometh the man; cometh the hour cometh Red Ed (actually I think Pink Ed suits him better), ready with a tiresome speech, cliché laid upon cliché, desperately trying to distance himself from his union puppet masters, trying to pretend that he is not Trilby to their Svengali.

Pink Ed is the leader this party deserves, a man with a common law wife, a man who hasn’t even the time or the decency to put his name on his own son’s birth certificate. Borg? No, he’s not a Borg or even a Vulcan; just a badly dressed chav, a chav leader for a chav party. Just imagine him as prime minister; no, don’t, the thought is far too ghastly. I think I’d rather have the Borg.

Ed Miliband - Union Man

Now the red pestilence strike all trades in Rome,
And occupations perish!

Coriolanus, Act IV, Scene I

The Labour Party leadership contest is over: Miliband fought Miliband and Miliband won! Perhaps there is a deeper victory here, deeper than that of Brother Ed over Brother Dave, still smarting, I’m convinced, over this filial treachery; treachery that stayed his dagger during the premiership of Gordon Brown with assurances that ‘his time was coming’; but when Dave’s time came so did Ed, so did Ed’s dagger!

Sorry, I’m getting away from my point: you are wondering about the ‘deeper victory’ to which I allude? It’s the posthumous triumph of Miliband senior, Ralph, that was, or to give him his name at birth, Adolphe Miliband, a noted British Marxist and sociologist (he must have been; it says so on Wikipedia!)

Adolphe was the son of one Samuel Miliband, who once lived in the Jewish quarter of Warsaw before he joined the Red Army in the Polish-Soviet War of 1919 to 1921. Was this an act of treachery against his country or a gesture of solidarity with the toiling masses? I’ll leave you to decide, but I’m convinced that he could not possibly have witnessed the actions of the ‘toiling masses’ in the shape of Semyon Budyonny’s Cavalry Army as they advanced towards Warsaw, cutting Polish, and Jewish, throats. Oh, incidentally, they cut Jewish throats because they were Jewish throats.

Again, I’m getting away from the point, and the point for the moment is Adolphe. He’s been dead for years now, dead before Tony Blair took over the Labour Party, dead before he could see his sons in the New Labour cabinet. I’m sure he would have been proud, though as a “noted British Marxist and sociologist” he did not have an awful lot of time for Labour, new or old, not an awful lot of time for parliamentary politics in any form.

He rests now in the shadow of Karl Marx in Highgate Cemetery, a mere eight meters away from the monument to the Grand Ayatollah of International Socialism, a little piece of old Eastern Europe in North London. Adolphe’s memorial is much more modest, with an inscription reading “Writer Teacher Socialist.”

Socialist, yes, that’s what he was. I feel certain that the contest between Big Brother Dave and Little Brother Ed would have caused him some anguish, though in his heart he would have secretly rejoiced over the unexpected victory of number two son, much closer to his idea of a socialist, proud that he is now being dubbed Red Ed by the press, a well deserved accolade. After all there were features of this election that must have recalled the glory days of the old Soviet Empire, the days when all voters were equal but some were more equal than others.

I’m not even going to bother trying to unravel the Byzantine complexity of Labour’s electoral college. Let me just say that it’s divided into three separate camps: members of the British and European parliaments, ordinary constituency members and then the trade union affiliates. Miliband senior actually carried the first two, but for Miliband junior it was the unions wot done it, though only a fraction of their membership actually bothered to vote.

The union bosses should be pleased by the outcome; in fact at least one among them had previously warned of ‘consequences’ if they did not get this outcome, all in the spirit of fraternal solidarity, you understand. We no longer have old New Labour or old Old Labour, no; we have Red Ed’s Labour, Labour Labour, there to protect the interests of working folk, otherwise known as union bureaucrats.

He’s a union man, Ed is; he will be grateful, I fell sure, to his paymasters, those who levered him so effortlessly into the leadership of the party, with greater things – one can only hope – to come. I’m not a member of the Labour Party, a pity in a way because I would propose the adoption of a new catchy ditty for Red Ed, an old song by a British band by the name of the Strawbs. For, you see, Red Ed’s a Union Man. :-)

A Load of Balls

Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance. Except, I would like to add, when the sinner in question is that well-known hypocrite Ed Balls, the former Schools' Secretary and now contender in the Labour Party leadership election.

Not so long ago he said that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was an “error” for which Britain had paid a heavy price. Now he has gone that one step further in distancing himself from Blair, Brown and all their works. Writing in the Observer on Sunday he said that the former government’s immigration policy was wrong and that the party will only rebuild trust only if it admits “what we got wrong.”

The rejection of transitional controls over Eastern European migration, he continues, had a serious impact on many communities, his own Parliamentary constituency included, not ready for the full implications of globalisation. More particularly mass immigration had the effect on depressing wages and impacting on the working terms and conditions of too many people across the country. It seems to have been a case, if I interpret him correctly, of British jobs for Polish workers.

At least he’s making progress- the invasion of Iraq was wrong, uncontrolled and irresponsible immigration was wrong. If he would only take that extra step and admit that there were only two things wrong with his government: everything they said and everything they did! We will be paying for the incompetence of that criminal administration for decades to come.

Personally I would have them arrested and put on trial, in much the same way that members of the wretched Popular Front administration in the France of the late 1930s was later put on trial by the Vichy authorities. I’m afraid those arrested would have to include Ed Balls, who cannot escape from his past sins and from his nauseating, self-serving hypocrisy quite so easily.

Murky Mandy

I could never quite understand why the last government placed such reliance on the twice-disgraced Peter, Baron Mandelson of Foy, a man whose shadow was scandal and whose technique was mismanagement. He was a disaster as a Labour minister and an even bigger disaster as a European commissioner (remember the trade war with China?) His last disservice to the Labour Party was surely in rescuing Gordon Brown from political oblivion and then running what must count as one of the most inept electoral campaigns in its history. For me he is a living symbol of the intellectual bankruptcy at the heart of the whole New Labour project, which was all about power, never principle.

Mandelson is the Labour Macbeth, in murkiness stepped in so far that should he wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o’er. Now the Daily Mail has exposed even more murkiness from his days as European Trade Commissioner. In 2005 he attended a dinner in Moscow as a ‘valuable extra’ with Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch, the kind of person much favoured by the socially insecure Mandelson, and the executives of Alcona, the American metals company.

Alcona was involved in negotiations to buy two of the Russian’s giant RUSAL aluminium plants. The chief concern was over tariffs within the European Union, tariffs that would have prevented the markets being flooded with cheap imports from the east. Though there is no evidence that Mandelson played any active role, his last minute appearance, arranged with such haste that he did not even have a valid visa – strings had to be pulled within the KGB - was enough to reassure the anxious American executives. The deal was duly concluded and in the following three years tariffs on metal imports were slashed. Not, I hasten to add, that there was any connection between the one and the other. :-)

So, where’s the beef? It was just another business deal. But the problem is, you see, that this deal, concluded under such questionable circumstances, took away British jobs from British workers. Metal plants were closed in South Wales and Scotland. I should add that Mandelson’s ‘silent’ presence, a little like the ghost of Banqo, to extend my Macbeth metaphor, was arranged by his good friend Nat Rothschild, who was also at the feast, anxious to smooth the way for the sale. Although Mandelson has so far declined to comment, a senior spokesman for the EU said that all tariff decisions were taken in full transparency, though he added that he was totally unaware of the Moscow dinner.

This seems to me to be typical Mandelson, not obviously culpable, just amazingly foolish, involving himself in situations that a wise person would avoid, failing to see his presence alone, certainly under such questionable circumstances, was enough to compromise him. He is a man easily flattered, easily seduced by the rich and the powerful. He is a man who, in his complete lack of judgement, has allowed himself to be manipulated and used. We’ve seen it time and again, not corrupt just blindingly naïve. He was never fit for any kind of senior office. His ability to move with ease from post to post through the Labour establishment is surely a sign of the decadence of modern politics.

Mosley and the New Party

Oswald Mosley, the eventual leader of the British Union of Fascists, was, rather like Winston Churchill, notable for his tendency to switch parties. Originally a Tory, he joined the Labour Party, rising to high public office in the wake of the party’s electoral success in the election of 1929. Always something of a political maverick, had no real roots in the British Labour movement; and in traditional Labour politics roots was everything. His obvious ambition, his personal vanity, and his tendency to strain at the constraints of party discipline, were also factors working against him. His intellectual brilliance and his personal charisma clearly impressed some, though in the end this was not enough.

The Mosley Memorandum was a bold scheme, with Keynesian overtones, for dealing with the problem of mass unemployment, but was in advance of orthodox thinking; in advance of what the senior figures in the government of Ramsay MacDonald were prepared to contemplate. When the cabinet failed to accept his arguments he resigned from ministerial office, comforting himself, one suspects, with the same false hopes of Lord Randolph Churchill - that his stature, the force of his argument would carry his parliamentary colleagues along the road of support. It did not.

In forcing a vote critical of government policy on unemployment he lost by 29 to 210. His last hope was to persuade the annual Party conference, held at Llandudno in October 1930. Although the constituency parties voted heavily in his favour the executive had the support of the trade union block vote. He was now an isolated figure in the movement, a prophet without honour.

It might be said that from this point onwards Mosley was carried forward by a mixture of conceit and frustrated ambition. He was already noted in the Party for a belief that 'dictatorial methods' were needed to deal with the depth of the economic crisis, causing some to nickname him the 'English Hitler.' Mosley was hopeful that Aneurin Bevan, a prominent Labour left-winger, would join his proposed New Party, but he shied away, saying that it would 'end as a Fascist party.' Mosley’s whole base of support soon evaporated. The New Party formed on a ripple, not a tide. Fascism lay beyond.

The World according to Piers

In a piece in The Spectator (I want to stand for Parliament) Freddy Gray, who conducted an interview with Piers Morgan, says that he comes across as the consummate new Briton: boorish yet charming, vulgar yet strangely elitist, at once chauvinist and cosmopolitan. Sorry, Freddy; I can get boorish, vulgar and chauvinist but not the other side of the equation. I do agree with you, though, that Piers, a former tabloid journalist and now a general telly person, famous for being famous, is an archetype of the Blair era. I can think of some more of the same species - Jonathan 'join me after the noos' Ross, Alan Sugar, Simon Cowell and Gordon Ramsay.

Ramsay, yes, what can I say about him? Let me see. I share a blog with an Australian friend of mine, a place where I contribute from time to time. When Ramsay was down under last year, displaying his usual wit and charm, I offered the following brief contribution;

I see that that boorish and foul-mouthed cook, Gordon Ramsay, has been shooting of his f*****g mouth in Australia. Not wise, I feel sure; definitely not wise, especially as it even attracted the disapprobation of the esteemed Kevin Rudd.

I’m sure people know that there are some brands that have a very short shelf-life; such is with Gordon the Gormless, a man with little charm and less talent. I would really hope that people in Australia, not reluctant to express an opinion themselves in-how shall I say?-the earthiest of terms, do not take the Great Gormless as just another ‘whinging pom.’ He’s not; he’s a useless whinging pom, something altogether different!

Please, guys and gals of Oz, don’t be taken in by this man. You may think that while his remarks about and to Tracy Grimshaw were completely over the top, he is at least excused by his talent. Talent, what talent? I would not go near any of the restaurants and bistros he runs in London; none of my friends would and none of my family would. You may not have heard of this but he runs a back street kitchen here, which ships ready-made meals to his various establishments; meals made with cheap ingredients and then marked up some 600%. Yea, that’s right, 600%! Gordon the Gormless is not worth the energy of your contempt.

See, I don't take prisoners! Anyway, that was last year. Much has changed, I feel sure, though I still do not go anywhere near Ramsay Street. :-)

They truly are a dreadful tribe, the Blair Babes, those thrown up under the aegis of New Labour, under the rubric of New Britain. Morgan, it seems to me, is the most typical of the oikish crowd, something of an archetype, I would go so far as to suggest. OK, let me be quite honest- I am prejudiced; I like people with charm and talent; I like people with intellect and finesse, some degree of polish, class, if you prefer; I have no time for vulgarians like Morgan.

I'm sure the favour is returned tenfold, and Morgan had things to say about David Cameron in his interview. He's frightened by the prospect of a Conservative victory, something that almost makes him "want to stand", to use his own words, though stand for what I'm not at all sure. To be fair he says he would run on a ticket of "openness and frankness", not qualities I have to say that I associate with this man or any of his ilk. Bullying, yes, shouting, yes, tantrums, yes, all things he demonstrated when he was editor of the News of the World and The Daily Mirror, even punching a hole in a wall on one occasion. I seems to me that he would fit very well into the political and personal style of our present Prime Minister! "I'm not quite as moronic as [people] think", Morgan informed Gray. Well, that's good to know, though seem to recall seeing a rerun of a certain episode of Have I Got News For You.

Perhaps you would like to know the shape of the cabinet he would favour, this charming, non-moronic man? It goes like this;

I'd make Simon Cowell home secretary. I'd make Alan Sugar treasurer, chancellor. There are all sorts of people I'd have in there. Nobody can tell me that Gordon Ramsay wouldn't sort out the food of this country, or that Sugar wouldn't rule the treasury with an iron fist. I think the country would benefit hugely if it had Cowell, Sugar and people of that calibre in government. I'd rather have that than a bunch of shallow boring little people in suits.

Hmm, lots of storming and shouting, lots of effing and blinding; sacking here and punching there; yes, that's the way to get things done, that's the way to do it, that's our new political fashion, the wave of the future. I assume he would favour himself as Prime Minister, a job for which he is ideally suited, going by the Brown model. I'm just so disappointed, though, that there would be no place for Jonathan Ross. He could keep the elderly of the nation distracted with comforting phone messages, and we know that the poor man is in need of a job just at the present.

A Good Man and a Useful Idiot

At the outset of Tristram Hunt’s appreciation of the life of Michael Foot in yesterday’s Observer he mentions something once said by Isaac Foot, Michael’s father and a one-time Liberal MP. It goes like this: “I judge a man by one thing, which side would he have liked his ancestors to have fought on at Marston Moor?”

I suppose he would judge a woman by the same standard, in which case I am delighted to say that I have absolutely no doubt about the answer to that; I would have wanted them to fight on the side of the Royalist army commanded by Prince Rupert, preferably among Lord George Goring’s regiment of horse on the left of the field. So there!

Clearly old Isaac and I would have had very little sympathy for one another, but I might conceivably have got on famously with his son, at least with the donnish side of his son, a man who loved history as much as I love history; a man who loved Swift and Hazlitt as much as I love Swift and Hazlitt. Yes, we would have had our differences; I admire the politics Pitt the Younger just as he hated them, and I think Thomas Paine a grossly overrated writer and a traitor besides!

Still, we would have made our peace, discussing some of the brilliant points he made in Debts of Honour, his collection of essays, discussing our mutual admiration not just for Swift and Hazlitt but also for such figures as Benjamin Disraeli. Yes, it would be on neutral ground like this, the politics of the past, where we could have met as sympathetic spirits. The politics of the present, or the politics of his life, rather, is the area I would have had greatest difficulty with.

You see, there is so much about Michael Foot the politician and activist that I simply don’t understand. I don’t understand how he could write a book like Guilty Men, condemning the principal architects of appeasement, when he in his own way was just as guilty, perhaps even more guilty, both in the 1930s and again in the 1980s, embracing conventional unilateral disarmament, in the first period, and unilateral nuclear disarmament, in the second, when both of these policies were positively harmful to this country. I would go further: appeasement was a necessary cover for rearmament, whereas promoting disarmament in the face of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia appears to me to be objectively treasonable. I hope I’m not being too harsh.

The tributes to Foot have been lavish and it’s easy to see why. He was a decent, thoughtful and humane man. It’s easy to see why when you compare him, unspun and homely, to the present shabby shower of Labour politicians; men like foul-mouthed Mad Gordon Brown and the oleaginous Peter Mandelson, aka Lord Rumba of Rio. Even The Spectator, the home of the political enemy, says of him that he was a “wonderful man.”

Still, one has to retain a sense of proportion here; yes, in many ways he was a wonderful man but as a politician he was quite hopeless. He was also strikingly naïve, allowing himself to be used by the KGB, as Charles Moore pointed out in Saturday’s Telegraph, holding regular meetings with Soviet agents, and even accepting small cash donations when he was editor of Tribune without asking questions. Again I hope I’m not being too harsh but I fully agree with Moore when he describes Foot as belonging to a sentimental Left, full of what Lenin once referred to as “useful idiots.” If only he had remained with the Swift and the Hazlitt.

The Protocols of the Elders of Labour

What follows is an imaginary document (it is, isn’t it?), an agenda for Britain by the Labour Party, based, of course, on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, another infamous forgery about a supposed conspiracy. The difference is that the elements, the substantive elements, are all drawn from real history, past happenings and, from the date of the document, coming events. What about the conspiracy element? Well, I leave that for you to decide. :-)

Dismantling Britain

London, sometime in the winter of 1996.

Comrades, let me summarise the main points of our discussion and the elements of our agreed strategy. There has to be an election in the coming year, so we must be ready with the most effective programme possible. Also, comrades, none of this will go into our published manifesto. Let me remind you that you are all pledged to absolute secrecy.

Past Achievements

1.1 Ever since it was founded at the beginning of this century our Labour Party has been pledged to the destruction of Britain and the British way of life. We have approached this task in various ways. Before the Second World War our governments were too weak, too dependent on the good will of the then Liberal Party, to do any real damage. Something might possibly have come out from the partial victory of 1929 if it had not been for the treason of Ramsay Macdonald, joining in the National Government with the terrible Tories. For the nation is something we hate. The pacifism we supported certainly went a long way towards ensuring the country was not ready for war in 1939, but not nearly far enough.

1.2 We had a great victory in 1945 and made much of it under the guidance of Comrades Atlee and Bevan. The best way to ensure that the country would be ill-prepared for the future, for competition with the other capitalist states, was to start spending money it did not have on welfare programmes that it could not afford. How stupid our enemies were not to recognise how clever we were in building a Welfare State in a bankrupt country! How much more we could have achieved if Comrade Atlee had not lost his nerve and went for a general election in 1951. The Tories managed to reverse some of our damage, though we still made real gains on the road to ruin, massive public spending based on an economy that depended in a large part on dying and antiquated industries. Our comrades in the Trade Unions offered us valuable support here.

1.3 Our next period in office from 1964 to 1970 also saw positive achievements. Some comrades made useful and lasting contacts with the comrade communists in the Soviet Union as part of our secret foreign policy programme. Information was exchanged and deals done. Comrade Jack Jones of the Transport and General Workers Union performed some valuable services here, both as a paid-up agent of the KGB and as a sponsor of new MPs in trade union rotten boroughs. Comrades Blair and Brown were eventually to benefit from this union sponsorship. Comrade Wilson, our Prime Minister, pretended to be renewing the economy and reforming ‘outmoded’ trade union practices; but the economy just got weaker and the unions stronger.

1.4. More good work was done in our next period of government from 1974 to 1979, especially in the creation of ruinous levels of inflation, helped along by deals with the trade union dons. But things were still not moving fast enough; Britain was proving more resilient than we expected. Then came the disaster of 1979; then came Margaret Thatcher, the devil incarnate, who set about ruing all of our best achievements. We came close, but not close enough. We have to try harder, accelerate our programme in such a way that no future Thatcher will be able to reverse our work.

Future Strategy

We are now prepared for government, for victory in the election of 1997. These are the chief elements we must work on.

a. Devolution. Scotland and Wales must be given a parliament, in the case of the former, and an assembly, in the case of the latter. It was a mistake, comrades, to oppose devolution in the past, for this is the best way of beginning the end of Britain and the best way of isolating England. Don’t worry, comrades; in the short term we will still have the support of the bloc Labour vote from Scotland and Wales at Westminster, though English Tories will have no input into the affairs of these nations. A brilliant tactic. In the long term it will not matter what happens in England or what the English think for, you see, there will be no more England, which leads on to the second main feature of our master plan.

b. Europe. We shall accelerate the death of Parliament in England by giving away more and more powers to the European Union. We shall pretend to be opposed to any major political changes in Europe, changes of a constitutional nature, while advancing these as fast as we can. One element here is to pretend to allow the people to have a say in such matters and then, when our goals are within reach, change our minds. This approach might be used just prior to a future election. Westminster shall become increasingly irrelevant in peoples lives; England shall become increasingly irrelevant. Indeed, our third major strategy will make it difficult for people in future even to define Englishness.

c. Mass Immigration. We will open the doors. We will allow everyone in, whether there is economic cause or not, diluting the native English stock in a new multi-cultural utopia. We shall denounce all words of caution as racist, thus silencing debate. When we are finished it will be impossible to reverse the trend. This may very well lead to new forms of extremism in our old heartlands, as voters feel more and more alienated, a danger, yes, but such a process will help us forward by leading to the further fragmentation of England.

d. The Economy. Comrade Brown, whom Comrade Blair intends to appoint as Chancellor of the Exchequer, has excellent plans for laying the foundations of economic ruin by deregulating the banking sector-killing capitalism by its own devices-and by building a credit-fuelled boom, which will take the nation deeper and deeper into unsupportable levels of debt, public debt and private debt.

Summary

It is our earnest hope comrades that we win not just the coming election but the election after that and the election after that. It is our hope that we win and win. After twelve years or so people will no longer recognise this country, recognise it for what it once was. But I repeat, comrades, secrecy must be maintained. Only by that will the Elders of Labour emerge triumphant. Triumphant indeed.

Balls to the BNP

Last week at the Labour Party conference Ed Balls’, the Schools Secretary, proposed a ban on teachers belonging to the British National Party, the BNP. So far as I am concerned this is a dangerous move, touching on some really fundamental issues, issues of civil liberty and issues of negative discrimination. Beyond that it touches on freedom of conscience.

The proposal itself, which I suspect will come to nothing, was little more than a gimmick, made by New Labour’s uber-geek, the man with the silliest hair-cut in politics, to a desperate and unhappy conference. Personally I have no time for the BNP. But anyone, anyone with the lest degree of political sense, can see that it has flourished under the present regime precisely because the concerns of thousands of working-class voters over issues such as housing and immigration have been ignored, not because the schools are full of ‘racist teachers’.

Yes, racism should be kept out of the classroom, but this is not about racism; it’s an intrusion into private areas of thought and belief. It would give further momentum to the BNP, allowing them to depict themselves as martyrs, victims of political oppression. What we are seeing here is scapegoating of the worst kind. Indeed, the need for scapegoats of one kind or another is something wholly identified with political extremism, or movements pushed to an extreme. This is a symptom of the nadir of New Labour.

Where does such a thing begin and where does it end? Racism, discrimination and negative perceptions take all kinds of shapes. What about Muslim teachers who consider non-believers to be ‘kafirs’? Does that not also carry dangers? What about those who sanction wife-beating and vilify homosexuals? What about those opposed to gay weddings or civil partnerships? What about teachers who embrace Marxist forms of thought, with all of the historical baggage that happens to carry? What about members of the Socialist Workers Party, an organisation that repels me personally far more than the BNP?

Yes, there have been regimes in history that have sacked teachers not for what they said but for what they believed, regimes like Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia. Are we to join them? We will if Balls and Chris Keates, the general secretary of NASUWT, the teacher’s union, have their way. Let me make one simple point for these men and all who would follow them into the tactic of the purge: it is quite possible to be a good teacher and-shock! horror!- a member of the BNP at one and the same time. Private political beliefs should be no more than that.

Let me put it this way. Ed Balls is retreating to the failed, inflammatory tactics of legislation and regulation which will only create more resentment amongst the dispossessed, more martyrs among Griffin’s rag-tag army and take Britain closer to a police state. Yes, I agree with that but this is a sentiment that I lifted from a site dedicated to exposing the BNP for what it truly stands for. You will find it here http://www.nothingbritish.com

I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it…unless you happen to be a nationalist, a Muslim, a socialist, a Marxist, a Christian a Jew and on and so on and so on.

Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves

Here I am, mounting the scaffold, ready to put my head in the noose once again. Ah, but it is a far, far better thing I do than I have ever done…:-))

I found myself smiling when I read David Barrett’s report in today’s Sunday Telegraph on gypsy camps (Minister’s ‘bullying’ on gypsy camps). Why, you might ask, since these camps will cost the taxpayer £100 million pounds; yes, that’s right £100 million. It’s not really that funny that they are being forced by our wretched Labour government on people and communities that simply don’t want them, including the people of Earsham in Norfolk, who’ve had to put up with an illegal camp for some time, with all of the inconvenience this entails.

So, why is it funny? Well, just think of all that lovely money, just think of all of the contactors queuing up to get their hands on it, especially in times like these, so hard for the building industry in particular. But, you see, they don’t want the work! Indeed they are so reluctant that the Department for Communities and Local Government has issued guidelines saying that, where no bids are received, the gypsy project should be made part of a general building work, lumping in the good, the bad and the ugly. Kurt Calder of the National Federation of Builders says this is a clear attempt to force contractors into unpopular projects.

Seemingly one builder in northern England is refusing to bid on the unreasonable grounds that when he last worked on a gypsy camp he lost £30,000 in the theft of equipment and supplies. One simply has to laugh!

On an entirely unrelated point I’m a late convert to the Telegraph from the Times, our family paper by long tradition. I switched because of the tremendous job the paper has done in exposing the scandal of Parliamentary expenses, showing the true value of a free press in a democracy. And, no, I’m not an editorial plant!

New Labour and the Politics of Insanity

I suppose we all feel that we are being driven mad by politics and politicians but look at the Labour government, look closely: it’s having a collective nervous breakdown! Are you surprised, is anyone surprised? I’m certainly not, though I’ve just read a good article in last week’s Spectator, which has helped me focus my thoughts. It’s by Martin Bright, the magazines’ blogger, and the piece is headed Insanity has always been integral to New Labour.

There are signs of personal insanity, yes, insanity, or forms of mental instability that some cabinet members, former cabinet ministers and key advisors have admitted to: John Prescott suffers from bulimia; David Blunket from depression, as does Alister Campbell, the former press supremo and one of the architects of the New Labour house of horrors. Lord alone knows what Joker Brown suffers from, apart from his well-publicised ‘psychological flaws’ and grim terminal Presbyterianism!

Now, there’s an interesting point on which to proceed, the Joker’s moral and religious convictions, the lie behind the whole thing, the lie behind him. The altogether loathsome Damian McBride served as a special advisor on Brown’s staff until he was caught trying to disseminate lies about opposition politicians, lies that did not stop short of embracing one MP’s wife. The emails in question were issued from Downing Street. What was the favoured poison? Perhaps you have already guessed? It was to be leaked that she suffered from a breakdown!

No surprise, really, that aspersions about mental health are this government’s favoured form of character assassination. I note that the ‘line’ on Hazel Blears is that she ‘could not handle it’, that she was ‘cracking’ under the pressure. It’s classic Freud, a process known by psychiatrists as ‘projection’-attributing to others one’s own feelings of disgust, inadequacy and self-loathing.

So, remember, the next time you hear one of the hydra heads of this government-possibly Lord Rumba- talking about the mental state of others, of opponents and ‘outsiders’, pay particular attention to the expressions used, to the width of the spin and the depth of the shaft. It will give you a better insight into the mental health of Joker Brown, “The Best Man for the Job”, and New Labour than I ever could. :-))