Selection, selection, selection

I listened to bits of Woman's Hour on Thursday morning as I flitted around the house dusting and hoovering.  I didn't get to listen properly but one item was a discussion between two female Labour MPs, Lucy Powell and Dawn Butler and Jenni Murray. The two MPs are both relatively new to their jobs although Ms Butler was forced to regroup after boundary changes meant she lost her seat.  Powell was originally in the shadow cabinet and resigned with all the others, Butler is seen to be an ally of Corbyn and has recently been kicked out of her post as chair of the Women’s Parliamentary Labour Party after being defeated by Jess Phillips.  I confess I didn't know very much about either woman before I heard the programme, but that is not surprising as I don't know very much about most MPs and there are 650 of the buggers. 

The discussion centred, this being Woman's Hour, about how to achieve a gender balance in the shadow cabinet.  This concentrated on whether the shadow cabinet should be elected or appointed.  To me the irony of this is that, as Dawn Butler pointed out in Jeremy Corbyn's original shadow, there were more women than men.  Until the resignations. 'Ah, but', said Ms Murray, 'not in the big jobs'. 

Of the two MPs. Ms Butler favoured appointments and Ms Powell favoured elections.  Ms Powell said, when asked if she would serve in a new shadow cabinet, 'If I want to rejoin the shadow cabinet via shadow cabinet elections, I would be bound by collective responsibility and I would be required to, I would have a duty on me and a responsibility to support Jeremy 100% on the airwaves and in public and in private and that would obviously be a compromise for me too.'  Why would this be any different in an appointed shadow cabinet? She then went on to say, 'The way that people were treated in the past needs to be rectified.'

What am I missing here?  In what way were people (and I assume she means women, though I may be wrong) treated in the past?  I really want to know.  Ms Murray slipped in the statement that, 'There seem to be so many women who are reluctant to serve under Jeremy Corbyn.' A statement moreover which went unchallenged by both MPs. This it seems to me is a big question.  And by the way all the quotes I have given were taken verbatim, by me from the BBC iPlayer version of the programme.  I seriously want to know what it is about the man whom I have decided to support as leader of the Labour Party and who's policies I fully endorse, I seriously want to know what he has done to deserve this. 

Is there a conspiracy of silence?  Are his sins so great that even the likes of John McTernan daren't even speak them out loud? My guess is probably not. Innuendo is often enough. The old 'there's no smoke without fire' approach to character assassination.

This led me on to thinking about the thorny problem of how we, and by that I mean the Labour Party, chose our candidates.  As a party of the left (allegedly) and one that espouses such principles as equality and fights against discrimination what is the best way for us to chose both fairly and sensibly?  We need, I feel, a proper representation of the population as a whole if we are to be true to our guiding principles.  Polling organisations are supposed to be good at this, and even to have some skill, although in my experience YouGov, whose surveys I sometimes complete, didn't choose me I volunteered to them, so how that fits in with their idea of a carefully chosen sample I am not sure. 

Gender imbalance, it seem to me, is only one aspect of this.  We have had all women shortlists, the elections for the shadow cabinet used to have quotas.  Have they worked? I don't know. 

For me the overriding aim must be to get the best candidate possible.  We have a candidate in every constituency except in Northern Ireland.  Not all these candidates will win.  Many have been MPs for years and unless there is sufficient pressure from their CLP then in my opinion they should be allowed to remain as a candidate. I know many favour mandatory re-selection, but there are many angry voters out there at the moment and any decision needs to be taken when tempers have cooled and by means of sensible discussion.  If we rush into changes the likelihood is that we will make the wrong ones.  Never forget the Law of Unintended Consequences.  It will bite you on the bum, as sure as egg is eggs.  

However if the present government have their gerrymandering way and the changes or something like them, proposed by the Boundary Commission are introduced then we will probably have quite a lot of selection to do in constituencies which have changed size and shape. This might satisfy the de-selectors, at least for a while, but it makes it even more imperative that we find a way to ensure we have the best set of candidates possible.

Clearly the most glaring question is one of gender.  Women are still woefully under represented in Parliament.  They make up slightly more than half of the population but only 29% of MPs are not men.  But there are also other questions to consider such as ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability.  Strenuous efforts must be made to address these considerations, but I think the Labour Party needs to sit down and completely rethink the way in which it selects its parliamentary candidates. It maybe that any new system of selection will closely resemble the one at present in place. On the other hand it may differ substantially. I do not have a crystal ball, and if I did it wouldn't show me anything because crystal balls just show you a distorted image of whatever is behind them.

Jeremy Corbyn wants to increase the level of democracy in the party and selection of candidates is essentially the job of the CLPs.  With the increase in membership these CLPs are now much bigger and more engaged than they have been for a very long time.  Members are going to have much more say in who represents them at General Elections and, if they win, in Parliament.  This is why we need to discuss the rules surrounding selection.  All women shortlist have been used and have resulted in the election of more women to Westminster, but have not been universally popular, not least because they prevented otherwise worthy male candidates from standing. There is also the thorny problem of which constituencies are chosen for AWSs.   

One of the criticisms which has been levelled at the Labour Party is the fact that it has lost touch with its core vote, and this is a situation which cannot be helped by candidates being parachuted in because the powers that be want a certain person to be in Parliament and there is no safe seat available where they currently live.

As a suggestion, shortlists could be made up of candidates with a demonstrable connection with the constituency, contain equal numbers of male and female candidates and at least one candidate from an ethnic minority.  These suggestions are completely off the top of my head, and would merely for the basis for discussion.  They could be coupled with a mandatory review of sitting MPs by the CLP every five years, say one year before the next General Election.  Most jobs have a system of appraisal and I see no reason why MPs should be different.  These reviews could be used to investigate outside interests as well as parliamentary performance and attendance.  MPs rely heavily on their CLP to do the leg work which gets them elected.  Painful though it may be I can see no reason not to hold them closely to account once elected.  This would be giving power back to the people, and while as Robert Peston suggested, it might be altering their status slightly from representative to delegate, if MPs are not answerable to those who put them in Parliament, then who are they responsible to?  

Tim, nice but...

I forced myself to watch my local MP Tim Farron address the Liberal Democrats at their annual conference because I was interested in what he had to say.  He had quite a lot to say as it turned out but I will limit myself to those bits which directly concern his attitude to the Labour Party, otherwise we will be here all day.

He had a lot to say about the EU and how he felt a sense of bereavement when we voted to leave.  In a roundabout way he compared it to the death of his nan, which I think might be pushing it a bit, and I would be interested to know what his nan thinks about this.  He is after a quite vocal christian and presumably believes in an afterlife.  I wouldn't mind being a fly on the wall when he gets to meet her again. As my local MP I asked him to support the bill on assisted dying, but as a christian he refused to do so.  Is this a conflict of interest between Liberal and religious values?

He attacked the Tories as one would expect and then he turned his attention to the Labour Party. Or rather he didn't.  He turned his attention to Jeremy Corbyn.  He has obviously seen how well personal attacks have worked out for Owen Smith and sought to emulate him.

Almost his first sentence claimed that Corbyn was a Marxist who had seized the means of production, and then he had some very cheap digs at Momentum Kids, implying it was a type of brainwashing.  I wonder if he supports the idea of Sunday Schools or the Boys Brigade. But then they are all right because their brainwashing is different. It's christian brainwashing.

He then attacked Corbyn for not providing an effective opposition, citing the internal struggles within the party as the reason.  I wonder who have caused these internal divisions?  It must be Corbyn as he is clearly a Trot who believes in permanent revolution.  It obviously has nothing at all to do with the PLP members who refused to work with him and instead challenged his leadership. 

He then, and I could hardly believe what I was hearing, said that if the Labour party weren't going to be the official opposition then it was up to the Liberal Democrats to fulfil that function.  What. All eight of them?  You gotta larf.

He then went on, get this, to big up Tony Blair.  He did say that he was proud to march alongside Charles Kennedy in the anti war march, and supported Vince Cable when he attacked bank de-regulation so he didn't give him his full and unreserved support but he did make an analogy which I feel fell on rather baffled ears in the conference hall.  He compared Tony Blair to the Stone Roses.  'Like the Stone Roses', he said, 'I preferred the early work'.  From their response to this gem I would guess that the majority of the delegates weren't entirely sure who the Stone Roses were, and what their early work consisted of.  Still, never mind Tim, nice to be down with the kids, eh?  He praised things like the minimum wage, investment in the NHS, school building and working tax credit. Most of all he praised that fact that Tony Blair was in government.  He justified the fact that his own party went into coalition with the Tories on the grounds that power is paramount. He fancies a big ministerial limo and an office in Whitehall.  He didn't have one last time because he was hanging back but this time he won't.  A sniff of power and he'll be there like a rat up a pipe.

He did however, in the midst of all this hero worship, gloss over the implications of the Iraq War and the rise of Daesh; the fact that the bank deregulation pretty much brought the entire global economy to its knees; the fact that much of the investment in the NHS was took place under the Private Finance Initiative, a policy which Labour opposed in opposition, but embraced wholeheartedly once in government; the establishment of academies; and the fact that working tax credits were merely a way of subsidising employers who paid low wages.  It's rather like the 'what have the Romans ever done for us?' scene in Life of Brian, only in reverse.  Wasn't Tony great, except...  Well at least he didn't eat anybody's baby.

Now.  Let us examine Farron's approach.  For a start he launched a personal rather than an ideological attack on Labour.  This is to a certain extent because many of his policies do not differ to any great degree to those of Corbyn.  Difficult therefore to rubbish them although there seem to be differences of emphasis and of how some things may be achieved. Both men however have recognised what a parlous state the country is in and both see the need to reverse the excesses of the Tory years.

There is another good reason for this.  What he quite clearly was doing was saying to those in the Blairite, to use his own words, wing of the party, look, when Corbyn wins again there is room for you in our party. He knows that many of them dislike Jeremy Corbyn intensely, he even mentioned some by name.  His vision is clearly to create a new super-party of the Centre, leaving the Labour party languishing on the fringes of the left.

Will this work?  I don't know.  Some might be persuaded across.  But would they want to put their names behind a brand which is still pretty toxic, and also would they be happy with this chirpy Johnny-come-lately northerner as their leader?  When the Gang of Four split from the Labour Party in 1981, they at least were in charge of the newly formed SDP.  Would defectors be happy to take subservient roles because I don't see Farron stepping aside and letting one of them become leader?

As a leader's speech I thought it was pretty good.  He spoke well and enthusiastically and quite honestly most of the things he suggested were sensible and in other circumstances might have appealed to me.  He would have certainly got my vote over that of any Tory, which is basically the choice here where I live  But I take issue with a few of the things he said.  

Firstly he resorted to a personal attack on the Labour leader, which tells me he both fears him and has no real substantial grounds for opposing him.  To quote Margaret Thatcher who said, 'I always cheer up immensely if an attack is particularly wounding because I think, well, if they attack one personally, it means they have not a single political argument left,' I think his anti Labour political arguments are pretty thin.  He of course would disagree but then 'he would, wouldn't he?' to quote again, only this time from Mandy Rice-Davies, an altogether different kettle of fish.

Secondly he praised Blair while saying he was proud to march alongside Charles Kennedy in the anti-war march.  Now forgive me if I am wrong, but I am pretty sure that a certain Jeremy Corbyn was a founding member of the Stop the War Coalition, was vocal in his condemnation of the war and also marched against it.  The Lib Dems moreover were late converts, looking for more backing from the UN before they fully committed themselves to it. Strange that Mr Farron should not have remembered that.  

And thirdly he tried to perpetuate the myth that the Corbyn supporting wing of the party do not really want to be in government.  Bollocks.

As far as I am concerned, if MPs on the right of the party want to join the Lib Dems then let them. At the next General Election it will solve the thorny problem of re/deselection.  The Labour Party can put up another candidate and win the seat for Labour once again.  The Lib Dems will be back where they started, and those disloyal MPs will be unemployed and available for Bake-Off and Strictly.  It's a win-win situation.

It's a funny game, football...

Twenty four hours is all it takes, or less even to change the political landscape.  It may not be obvious but strange things are afoot. 

Firstly Smiffy has accepted defeat.  How do I know? Well not from his interview on the BBC this morning which I dipped into where he did say 'I'm determined that if I win... ' at which point I stopped listening.  

No, I know because he told me himself.

Isn't that thoughtful of him?  He must have known I was writing this and sent me a nice email to get me started.  I have asked him not to send me stuff, but apparently he now sends it through the Labour Party and I haven't blocked them in case they feel the need to suspend me.  It would be useful to know if this happens so I am keeping lines of communication open.  Anyway this email was all about 'what's next'.  He bangs on in his enthusiastic way about the thousands of 'members and supporters' he has met since he started his campaign.  He says the one question he has been asked time and time again is, 'What happens next'.  He then reiterates that he is Labour to his core.  Maybe we should cut him open to find out if this is true.  Then he lists Labour's achievements including the NHS, minimum wage, workers rights, and so on, at the same time managing to suggest that he had some major part to play in all of them, then he says on Saturday we shall know who the next leader is and we need to unite the party.  

He finishes with 'The fight is only just beginning.'

He is of course referring to the fight against this Tory government, conveniently ignoring the fight we have been having for the last three months or so, as a result of him deciding to challenge the elected leader of the party. Thanks for those pearls of wisdom Owen, much appreciated.  Now if you could just explain to a simple man like me how challenging your leader helps to hold the government to account, I am all ears.  You see I am not a political sophisticate, indeed I am not really any sort of sophisticate, but to use a sporting analogy: if you are in a cup final and instead of defending against the opposition and trying to put the ball into their net you encourage as many members of your own team as you can persuade to listen to you to spend the entire match hacking at the ankles of your own captain, what do you think the result will be? I think I know.

However to get back to Owen's kind message to me (with a separate one to my wife too, no effort spared) it is pertinent to notice that he at no time seems to assume that he will become the leader.  Is this the beginning of his nemesis, following his former hubris? Maybe the penny started to drop when John Pienaar asked him if he still thought he could win and when he said yes, replied, 'Really? Well you're the only person I've spoken to today who does.'

Smiffy is obviously looking at the future, and it is definitely Back-Bench (a new shade of green in the Farrow and Ball Autumn Catalogue).  What are the odds that we see a career change at the next election, even without de-selection?  That's what happen when you burn your boats Owen. David Cameron lasted a few weeks on the back benches, can you?

So Smiffy has given up all hope of leading the party into the mysterious mist shrouded uplands which are his real policies.  What else has changed?

Well basically both Channel 4 and the BBC have scored own goals in our putative cup final. I'm not sure which side they were actually on, but I do know it didn't play in red.  Perhaps this was a new triangular form of the game, or even multi-dimensional.  I really don't know. What is clear that both broadcasters had current affairs programmes on Monday night, just two days before the voting closed, which were designed to, at the very least, hinder the progress of Jeremy Corbyn. 

And neither of them really succeeded. 

I, like many of the Corbyn school of thought, had braced myself for a rocky and shouty evening.  I didn't really want to watch either programme but I made myself in order to be able to write about them with some authority. 

The Channel 4 Dispatches was billed as an exposé into what is really going in Momentum.  It turns out that nothing very startling was going on at all.  They had a plant working undercover for six months, I repeat, six months, and the best they could come up with was a discussion about deselection (we have these at the dinner table here), some question about whether Unite knew that Momentum was using an office in their headquarters (they do now), and a question of who actually paid the spy, apart from the production company for whom she was also working.  I'd like to think she gave one of her wage packets to charity but I don't expect she did.  There was blurry footage of a public meeting, a couple of bits from some left wingers, and that was about it.  I expected at least a naked sabbat and human sacrifice.  I felt like demanding my money back.

John Pienaar was slightly more professional on Panorama, over on the BBB, but he too shot himself in the foot.  For a start he concentrated far too much on Brighton, which is a nice place to visit in the Summer, and the CLP has been suspended there, but watching the programme you would be forgiven for thinking that Momentum was a south coast phenomenon. Given the fairly mind-bogglingly rightwing views of the Labour MP Peter Kyle it is small wonder that there is a certain amount of tension between MP and CLP.  If I were a Labour voter and he was my MP I'd be pretty pissed off too. 

There were many similarities in the two programmes which should not come as too much of a surprise as they were both apparently made by Films of Record, MD: Neil Grant, an old enemy and one time assistant of Ken Livingstone.  Both programmes featured the 74 year old Neil Kinnock, fresh from expelling Militant from the Party, which is the last thing of any note he did, if you discount dragging Glenys into the sea in front of the world's TV cameras, saying or at least agreeing with assertions put him.  In Dispatches they wheeled out Gavin Millar QC a colleague of Cherie Blair and brother-in-law of Alastair Campbell to provide them with some impartial legal opinion.  I wonder what he charges per hour.

Effectively what seems to have started out as an attempt to destabilise the Corbyn campaign at the eleventh hour, although as pretty much every Corbyn supporter I have had any sort of contact with voted weeks ago, what they thought they were going to achieve I am not sure, has ended up being something of a reassurance to those non party members who are worried about the infiltration of the 'hard' left.  There just doesn't seem to be any worth speaking of.  No anarchists with suspicious fizzing bombs and big beards, no trots, just enthusiastic people of all ages, inexperienced maybe, but evil, definitely not, with no real hidden agendas.  There will be one or two, just as there are un-reconstructed fascists hanging around the fringes of the Conservative Party, and vegan shock troops in sandals and duffel coats in the Lib Dems, but they are few and we, the ordinary supporter are many, very many.

Both programmes were billed as hard hitting investigations, but what they found was, honestly rather disappointing.  Panorama: Labour: Is the Party Over?; Dispatches: The Battle for the Labour Party.  Big titles for bugger all really. 

There may have been good programmes to have been made here, but when Zac Goldsmith tweets “Dispatches was weak. It will only reinforce the view that the establishment wants to trash Corbyn. Suspect it'll have the opposite effect.” then it hasn't gone well.  Both programmes missed their goals with the unerring accuracy of the England team faced with a penalty shoot-out, and for that I for one am grateful.

An antidote to Peston

Yesterday all my troubles...

Start again.  

Yesterday Robert Peston posted a long spiel on Facebook following his ITV interview with Jeremy Corbyn.  It began thusly: I've interviewed Jeremy Corbyn three times in the past year, and it is always a slightly disconcerting experience. 

Well Robert. May I call you Robert? Well Robert I imagine being interviewed by you can be a slightly disconcerting experience.

Anyway Mr Peston goes in to analyse in some detail the consequences of the changes to the way the Labour Party is run proposed by Mr Corbyn. And it makes interesting reading and raises some interesting points.  The full script is here 
https://www.facebook.com/pestonitv/posts/1694904357500969 and those of you who are interested may like to read it in full.

For those of you who can't be arsed however I will attempt a precis. What Peston has realised is that what Corbyn is proposing will turn British politics on its head.  In the past the various parties have put up candidates in each constituency; the electorate in each constituency decided which of those candidates they would like to represent them in Parliament by the simple expedient of seeing which of them got the most votes; and then that elected member sat in the House of Commons and represented that constituency and all the voters in it, whether they had voted for them or not. It is what is known as a representative democracy.  Until the next time they stand for election the member is free to vote how he or she chooses, without reference to his or her constituency.  What Jeremy Corbyn proposes is that the those in the constituency should have a greater say in development of policy within the party. Instead of top down paternalism, Corbyn favours bottom up policy making.  

Peston claims that this will mean that MPs will cease to be representatives and will instead become delegates representing the wishes of the grass-roots of the party.

He worries that this will give Corbyn a stranglehold on the party and will subvert the unwritten constitution of the United Kingdom.

Let, me a mere mortal examine this assertion.

Firstly let us examine the benefits or otherwise of a representative democracy.  Under our appalling first-past-the-post system we are presented every five years with a list of candidates and asked to put our cross against the name of one of them.  The one that gets the most crosses then gets to spend five years in Westminster representing our best interests. Ha bloody ha.

So what choice do we actually have in this so called democratic system?  We have a choice of whether or not we make a cross and if we do, where we put it.  If we are a member of a political party and are very active in the local constituency party we may get some say in who we choose to vote for.  In the Labour Party a shortlist in each constituency is drawn up by the shortlist committee which is then voted on by branch members.  The winner is then the candidate.  In the case of the Conservative Party they have a national list of approved candidates, with a series of hoops through which a hopeful has to jump before being co-opted and local associations choose a candidate form this list, I think...

Basically therefore most people have no say in who is actually on the ballot paper in the first place.  How they then decide to vote is also interesting. I don't suppose many voters actually attend hustings.  Most people will have been unfamiliar with the concept before it was revived on a monumental scale in recent weeks.  How many people would turn out to a political meeting? Three or four, a dozen at most: the party activists and someone to make the tea and help clear the chairs away afterwards. Most people I am sure vote for a party not a person.  This maybe less true in very marginal constituencies and where there is either some sort of scandal surrounding the sitting MP or where one of the candidates is some sort of celebrity, either nationally or locally, but in general most voters know very little about their MP unless they have had personal dealings with them.

And most constituencies are nominally safe seats.  

This person, this MP is therefore the one who has been chosen by some of your fellow constituents to represent you all in Parliament. In the 2010 General Election, the most recent I can get figures for without going right back to source, only 127 Conservative, 77 Labour and 12 Lib Dem MPs were elected with more than 50% of the votes cast.  If we factor in turnout those figures would be much lower.  Nevertheless this MP is the person who represents your interest in Parliament, whoever you voted for.  Except it doesn't work like that in the real world.  It is, not to put too fine a point on it, absolute bollocks.

For a start the parties have what is known as the whipping system which ensures, as far as possible that all MPs follow the party line.  So in a constituency which has a Conservative MP but also has a proportion of the electorate who are dependent on tax credits, when the MP is faced with having to vote on a bill to cut those tax credits how does he or she vote? Well experience tells us that they vote with their party rather than with their conscience. One of the reasons Jeremy Corbyn is so unpopular with elements of his own party is that he voted with his conscience rather than with the whip when he felt it was necessary. History has proved that in the majority of cases he voted correctly, but that is not the issue here. In fact it is not possible for Constituency MPs to represent the best interests of all their constituents because sometimes their interests are diametrically opposed.

What we actually have is a dogs' breakfast of a system where it is possible, nay more common than not, for an MP to be elected with less than 50% of the popular vote and then to vote entirely as he or she pleases on any matter in the house of Commons. He or she is pressured to vote along party lines by the whips' offices, organisations which in any other walk of life would be investigated for workplace bullying.  If this does not accord with the wishes of the constituency then the voters have an opportunity every five years to vote them out. But as we have seen because the constituents have very little say in who stands as a candidate in their constituency and also because most people vote for a party not a person they have a very good chance of being re-elected.

What Jeremy Corbyn is suggesting is an extension of power in terms of policy making and candidate selection to include ordinary members of the party, and possibly, I don't know, party supporters such as the £3/£25 supporters who were able to vote in the leadership elections.  This may or may not include re-selection/de-selection every five years.  We are not clear on this.  If it does it will be a powerful tool to keep MPs in line with their CLP's wishes. 

Mr Peston sees this as an attempt by Corbyn to grab more power.  He says 'That would mean a future Labour government - if Corbyn has his way - would to a great extent be directly answerable to paid-up Labour members, and ministers and MPs ties and loyalty to the wider electorate would be weakened.'

I don't know what planet Mr Peston is living on but I see precious little evidence of these ties and loyalty to the wider electorate at present.  How do they manifest themselves?  Does he refer, I wonder to the disconnect between MP and constituency when MPs are parachuted into safe seats.  Are these 'ties and loyalty to the wider electorate'?  If so why are they good.  MPs should be answerable to their constituency. The constituency members are the ones who put in all the leg work to get them elected, who run things when they are off at Westminster or somewhere exotic at an international conference.  I wonder how the members of Hartlepool CLC really felt about having Peter Mandelson as their MP?  It's a wonder he even knew where Hartlepool was.  I'm sure someone will now tell me what brilliant constituency MP he was, but he was hardly local, or working class was he and that is a perceived reason for the desertion of 'natural' Labour voters in the direction of UKIP.

What is Mr Peston frightened of? Probably nothing really.  He is a provocative journalist who I actually quite admire, but he is still part of the establishment and that makes him relatively conservative in his outlook if not his politics.  

Marx and sparks

One of the talking points on Thursday's Question Time was the claim that John McDonnell had described himself as a Marxist.  I did a bit of digging and indeed the Telegraph had a short clip of him addressing a meeting to discuss the 2008 financial crash in which he said 'I'm a marxist'.  So he claim was correct.  Well yes... and to a certain extent, not necessarily.  Of course only McDonnell himself actually knows what he meant, but watching the clip it seems to have been something said slightly in jest.  

What he actually said was, ‘We’ve got to demand systemic change. Look, I’m straight, I’m honest with people: I’m a Marxist.

‘This is a classic crisis of the economy – a classic capitalist crisis. I’ve been waiting for this for a generation!

‘For Christ’s sake don’t waste it, you know; let’s use this to explain to people this system based on greed and profit does not work.’

It seems to me, and I may be biassed, unlike the journalist at the Daily Mail where I found the quote, that he was speaking in a historical context, rather than issuing a call to the barricades. What he seemed to be saying that the theory put forward by Marx which involved the inevitable decay and death of the capitalist system and its replacement first by socialism and then ultimately by communism had reached a point where capitalism was failing and socialism should be introduced to replace it.  As a socialist he had been waiting for most of his life for the right moment to arrive and this was it. Evidence for my assertion can be found in the final line of his statement, not generally quoted in the rightwing press.

In my humble opinion for what that's worth, there seems to be ample evidence that the capitalist model is failing.  It benefits only the very rich, leaving most of us to make do as best we can and it requires propping up by the state at regular intervals.  This is achieved by huge injections of cash directly into the banking system by a system called quantitive easing, or more simply, printing money.  The idea is that with more money in circulation the banks will lend more and this will stimulate the economy.  What actually seems to happen is that the banks stuff it under the bed for a rainy day and let the rest of us go hang.  Had all this extra money been pumped into say, the NHS and housebuilding programmes, imagine the benefit which would have accrued. 

What MDonnell and Corbyn are suggesting is we pump money into the system just as has already been happening but we put it where it can do most good rather than give it to the very institutions which got us into this mess in the first place.  In what other walk of life could you make an enormous cock up on an almost unimaginable scale and instead of being called to account you are given astronomical sums of extra cash and told to have another go.  

As far as I can see, and I am no economist or expert, the problem began when banks stopped fulfilling their traditional function which was to take deposits from savers paying them interest, and then lending this money at higher rates to borrowers and pocketing the difference.  When the difference between those two rates was too great it became usury, which pre-payday loans was frowned upon.  Now the bastards advertise on the television.

What banks realised was that they could make much more money by using the cash deposited with them to gamble on various money markets. What allowed this to happen was the process of deregulation of banking and stock markets begun under Thatcher and continued under Blair. Banks and financial institutions began to invent financial products designed to make them richer and the rest of us poorer.  They slipped in things like PPI under the radar, and we all paid for it, until, that is they were found out.  They were able to do this sort of thing because they were, and to a large extent still are, self regulating.  Self regulating is a sort of oxymoron in my book. Regulation implies oversight, and how can you provide oversight to yourself, without the use of mirrors (and probably quite a lot of smoke as well)?  

So John McDonnell doesn't like this system and when he invokes the name of Karl Marx in relation to the dreadful situation we find ourselves in he is vilified by those with the greatest investment in this system, the super rich and their dogsbodies.

John McDonnell may invoke the name of Marx but for all practical purposes he is a democratic socialist who works within the system, to change it by democratic means.  Were he really a revolutionary Marxist I feel sure he would have made his move by now, I mean he is no linger young, nor in the best of health.  

All this talk of ideologies got me thinking and I wondered if I could find anywhere the basic creeds of the three main parties who seek to be elected in this country.  I ignored UKIP because even they don't seem to know what they want and they are a shambles at the present.  I accept that the same could be said of the Labour Party but their mess is caused by a struggle for the soul of the party whereas UKIP's seems to be much more fundamental and their whole raison d'être appears to be based on what they don't like rather than what they want to achieve

Labour's aims and values are clearly laid out in the famous Clause IV of their rule book.  The first paragraph reads: 

1. The Labour Party is a democratic socialist Party. It believes that by the strength of our common endeavour we achieve more than we achieve alone, so as to create for each of us the means to realise our true potential and for all of us a community in which power, wealth and opportunity are in the hands of the many not the few; where the rights we enjoy reflect the duties we owe and where we live together freely, in a spirit of solidarity, tolerance and respect. 
   

This is followed by four more paragraphs outlining more detail.

The Liberal Democrats have a similar section.  In the preamble to their constitution they state: 

• The Liberal Democrats exist to build and safeguard a fair, free and open society, in which we seek to balance the fundamental values of liberty, equality and community, and in which no one shall be enslaved by poverty, ignorance or conformity. We champion the freedom, dignity and well-being of individuals, we acknowledge and respect their right to freedom of conscience and their right to develop their talents to the full. We aim to disperse power, to foster diversity and to nurture creativity. We believe that the role of the state is to enable all citizens to attain these ideals, to contribute fully to their communities and to take part in the decisions which affect their lives.

This too is followed by four more paragraphs of details.

The Conservative Party Constitution (which costs £10 to buy) states:

NAME, PURPOSE, OBJECTS AND VALUES 

1. This is the Constitution of a political party which shall be known as “The Conservative and Unionist Party” (referred to in this Constitution as “the Party”). 
2. Its purpose is to sustain and promote within the Nation the objects and values of the Conservative Party. 

And that is it.  

It then goes on to describe how the party is to be organised over approximately seventy more pages.

Nowhere does it actually say what these objects and values are.  I have tried Googling, but I can find nothing which provides further enlightenment.

So folks, next time you vote for the Conservative and Unionist Party remember you are voting for a party which stands for what it stands for.  Just don't ask what that is.  Remember brexit means brexit.

Me. I'd rather know what I was voting for and not just whom.  I quite like the idea of having some sort of ethical or ideological reason to put my cross on the ballot paper.  Is that odd?

Could we have Kippers for breakfast?

I like to think I was well brought up.  My father had very high standards of honesty and decency which at times I found it difficult to live up to.  He was also quite autocratic and could be domineering, but none of us is perfect.

One of the things which was drummed into us at an early age was how to behave with people who were different from us.  Don't stare, don't point, don't giggle, don't say anything rude or upsetting, don't mock the afflicted whoever they may be.  I have to confess to not being above the odd bit of Schadenfreude now and again and I enjoy brief bursts of You've Been Framed, but generally I still try to respect the differences of others, and not take any notice of them (their differences not the people themselves.)

It was with some shame therefore that I found myself laughing out loud this (Saturday) afternoon. I had just regained consciousness after my customary siesta and was flicking through the TV channels and bracing myself before going out and throwing a ball for Spike our Patterdale terrier. I chanced upon the BBC Parliament Channel, which is relatively easy for us because here in rural Cumbria, hidden away behind a hill and unable to have direct sight of a proper TV transmitter we have to make do with the limited service from a local booster.  

And guess what was on.  The UKIP Party Conference from Bournemouth.  

Now I had only just recovered from hearing that The Chief Weasel had been skinny dipping the night before, and with that image still burned into my synapses, I happened upon the conference. It appeared to be taking place in a smallish hall and on the stage was a group of individuals of indeterminate age.  In front of them was a man waving enthusiastically.  As I turned the sound up I realised they were singing, not well, but definitely singing.  The familiar strains of the opening to Jerusalem seeped out of the PA system, and they broke into that familiar hymn.  I realised I had stumbled upon the closing ceremony to the UKIP conference. Let me tell you, Rio it wasn't.  

As they limped their way through the well known words I realised what it reminded me of. Imagine a coach load of pensioners who have been on a day trip and who have prevailed upon their driver to stop at Watford Gap so that those with weaker bladders can avail themselves of the facilities thus allowing them to finish their trip in relative comfort.  As they are standing round waiting for the last few to dribble back, the coach driver suggests a sing-song to keep their spirits up.  They launch into a few patriotic songs and some even have a decent stab at the tune.  This my friends was the UKIP choir.  

Having watched Gareth Malone on the BBC I know it is possible to create a very acceptable ensemble out of the most unpromising material.  What soon became clear was that if this was the best that UKIP could manage even he would have had his work cut out.  They appeared not to have rehearsed at all and what singing there was was in (approximate) unison, with what sounded like one tenor trying manfully to add some musicality to their efforts.  Now I cannot talk as I am no singer, but neither am I in a choir.  I sing for myself and do not, generally, inflict my efforts on others.

They struggled to the end of Jerusalem and then the Chief Waver announced that they were going to do Land of Hope and Glory, just like they do it at the Last Night of the Proms, complete with humming and knee bending.  And so they did.  

Well if anything were to make our breasts swell with pride and strike fear into the hearts of our enemy, this was not it.  There is quite a bit of instrumental stuff in this tune, and despite the fact that it was a karaoke version, with a pre-recorded backing track, the Chief Waver kept on waving his arms, as if practising in front of the mirror in his bedroom.  When it got to the humming bit, a strange mooing noise emerged from the assembled chorus, and then glory be they did the knee-bend bit.

Well laugh? I nearly shat (to quote Derek and Clive, for those of you old enough to remember them).  Firstly, many of those who still possessed functioning knee joints demonstrated, almost to a gentleman or lady, that they did not have a sense of rhythm. As one went up another would be on the way down and a third somewhere between the two.  It was like watching an oscilloscope displaying a complex wave form. Many however had knees which could no longer be relied upon, so they resorted to other methods of punctuating their performance.  Some waved hopefully, others shook their heads, and one very elderly lady patted the front of her skirt. 

I understand that at the beginning of their set they sang a version of 'Who Do You Think You Are Kidding Mr Hitler?' with witty lyrics beginning 'Who do you think you are kidding Mr Cameron?' and no doubt continuing in a similar side-splitting manner. This is already available on YouTube but sadly I cannot find their stab at Land of Hope and Glory, otherwise I would share it with you. The BBC have much of the conference available on iPlayer but their final clip seems to end just before the choir took to the stage while they were discussing foreign aid.  And if you want to be disgusted, rather than amused, can I recommend you watch that.  Maybe the BBC took pity on them, which given their recent political bias would not surprise me, or maybe they have sold it to Harry Hill for £250 to be shown endlessly on You've Been Framed. 

I really shouldn't mock but I can't help it.  UKIP is a disgusting nationalistic, racist, divisive party. They would argue that they have members of many ethnicities, and I would reply that bigotry takes many forms and is not the sole preserve of white Anglo-Saxons.  It wants, nay demands that it be taken seriously.  Well let me tell you, on the showing today there is zero chance of that. As a rallying point for British nationalists the only way in which their conference resembled one of those great gatherings of nationalistic hubris, the Nuremberg rallies was that many of the members in Bournemouth looked old enough to have attended the originals in Germany. 

The Chief Weasel, once he had dried himself off and put his trousers back on, announced that he is to tour Europe and do his best to destroy the EU by encouraging those sceptics in other member states to follow his lead and try and force their countries out.  God he is an annoying little tick, isn't he?  It really is none of his business.

UKIP want to be taken seriously. Well they really need to get their act together.  What I saw of the conference, culminating in the fabulous closing ceremony, would have embarrassed a parish council, charged with organising a village fete.  They were a one issue party, they have succeeded in their aim of getting us out of the EU, now could they just please bugger off and leave us to clear up the mess.

Manners maketh man

It seems to be a commonly held belief, especially among our American cousins, (I do have distant relatives in the US, although I have not discussed this with them) that we British are polite. Quite where this misapprehension has come from I am not certain, but I think Hollywood may have something to do with it.  They also think we all have bad teeth, wear bowler hats and carry rolled up copies of The Times and furled umbrellas when ever we venture out of doors.  

This belief is incorrect.  Not the Bowler hat and umbrella one, that is so obviously correct. No I mean the one about politeness. I think the British are possibly the rudest people in the world.  We can be staggeringly rude at times, it's just that we tend to do it in a superficially polite manner.

At the lowest level we have the 'No offence but...' brigade, who feel those three magic words entitle them to say anything they like. Then we have the blunt talking, 'I like to call a spade a spade' lot, who almost invariably have no idea what constitutes a spade and could not differentiate one from a shovel even if they were both labelled.  Higher up the food chain we encounter sneering distain which is often missed by those not from these islands and unable to discern the hidden message. Then we have those who unconsciously patronise those whom they see as in some way inferior.  Margaret Thatcher was very good at that sort of impoliteness. Moving towards the top we have those who are so bound up in their privilege that they don't even realise that they are being rude, often unbelievably so, and certainly would be surprised if it were pointed out to them. And finally we get right to top and break through the scum floating on the surface of the pond and out into the sunlight where we ordinary mortals are not even allowed to speak unless spoken to. 

If we superimpose onto this labyrinthine structure questions of religion, ethnicity, colour, education and sex, we finish up with a heady mix of concealed nastiness.  That is not to say that everybody behaves according to this code of conduct, but it does mean that as a society we are by no means as polite and well mannered as others might see us.

Nowhere was this made more clear to me than last night on BBC1's Question Time when John McDonnell was thrown to the lions.  

The whole charade was, as usual, presided over by ex-Bullingdon Boy David Dimbleby.  For years I have admired, even loved the BBC and have done what little I can to defend its status as a public service broadcaster, free from the constraints of advertisers.  I refuse to have anything to do with Sky and the odious Murdoch, and have watched in dismay as programme after programme has migrated from the terrestrial to satellite platform.  I used to watch and listen to the BBC to get a clear and unbiassed reporting of the news, I still think that Radio 4 is undoubtedly the best and most informative radio channel anywhere in the world, but...

And there alway is a 'but' isn't there? How can the BBC, indeed any self respecting broadcaster, but especially the BBC, one of whose remits is to behave with impartiality, think it is in anyway proper to set up a programme such as the one which they broadcast on Thursday night.  I understand that the programme is broadcast live and they cannot control the content, but there is absolutely no doubt that the whole thing was a stitch-up.  There is a panel of five, I don't know what to call them, certainly not celebrities, although they are undoubtedly known to the public. Experts?  Not necessarily.  Political figures?  Not always. Talking heads? Possibly.  On Thursday the panel consisted of Anna Soubry, who revealed herself to those of us unfamiliar with her oeuvre as a political Katie Hopkins, Quentin Letts, an opinionated right-wing journalist from the Daily Mail, Tony Blair's attack poodle Alastair Campbell, a token SNP MP Joanna Cherry and Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell.

To me that is not a balanced panel but I too am biassed so let's just leave that as my opinion. I do think however that David Dimbleby's job, for which he is no doubt paid a great deal of money, more than the Director General according to the Daily Telegraph, that organ of truth and probity, is to keep the level of personal abuse down to acceptable levels and to ensure sensible debate. In the case of Ms Soubry he signally failed to take her to task over some fairly vicious attacks on McDonnell.  Ms Soubry has obviously not been brought up with any concept of manners at all.  It is possible however that, in many people's minds she has merely confirmed their view of her as a screeching owl, probably still cross that Mrs May has pushed her out of the nest.

Alastair Campbell is an altogether different kettle of stinking fish.  Where Ms Soubry's preferred weapon of assassination would appear to be the claw hammer, or possibly a lump of wood with a nail through it, Campbell favours poison.  This he administers in small doses until a lethal level is achieved.  Last night he didn't attack Jeremy Corbyn, admitting that he was probably right on Iraq, and that they, Blair et al, may have cocked that up.  There were however constant references to the hard left and how Labour were throwing away all he had achieved.  He didn't make one outright attack but constantly undermined what McDonnell was saying, following the Smith line of needing to be in power, while ignoring the fact that his behaviour was contributing massively to this. He said that a great deal of nastiness had crept into the party, without acknowledging that much of it was coming from his side of the party, but then he wouldn't, would he? Is David Miliband poised in the wings? Who knows? 

I felt slightly sorry for Ms Cherry who hardly got a look in and tried to claim that her party was the only opposition to the government. Quentin Letts was having none of that.  The thrust of much of what she was allowed to say seemed to be about the fact that Jeremy Corbyn was not attacking the government on Brexit.  She implied it was because he was in favour.  I suspect it is because Mr Corbyn thinks that there are more pressing problems such as housing and grammar schools which demand his immediate attention. After all he can hardly question the government's policies on the EU when they have yet to produce any.

Watching it all again just now on iPlayer I realised what it was that really got under my skin about Ms Soubry.  It wasn't that she attacked John McDonnell at every possible opportunity. That, it might be argued, is her job.  It wasn't that she called him 'a nasty piece of work,' and in justifying this more or less implied that he stalks the Palace of Westminster after dark waiting to attack female Labour MPs who live in fear of their lives. It wasn't that she tried to perpetuate the myth of rampant anti-semitism within the Labour Party.  It was the way she behaved in those odd moments when she had her mouth shut.

This afternoon (Friday) I was dozing in front of the telly after my lunch.  I am a great believer in the siesta, and daytime TV is perfect for sending me to sleep.  While flicking through the channels I happened upon CBBC.  Now I am not an aficionado, not being part of their target demographic. The programme which was on however caught my eye.  It was a quiz called Top Class and was hosted by Susan Calman, who presumably is not yet on the stratospheric salary scale which is exercising so many of the media at present, though her apparent ubiquity both on TV and Radio must mean it is only a matter of time.  I really enjoy her wit on The News Quiz, so I paused and watched for a moment.  Two teams from different schools were 'battling it out'.  On the buzzer round, there were two boys from what turned out to be the losing school, who were a bit trigger happy.  'Buzz first and think later' seemed to be their modus operandi.  Almost invariably they answered incorrectly but when told so they frowned, looked surprised and extremely sceptical, as if Ms Calman had the wrong answer written on the card.  It is the same expression often seen on the faces of litigants on Judge Rinder, another stape of daytime TV and shop window for TV wannabes.  It is the look of pained hurt when someone accuses you of something and you have no immediate right of reply.  A surprised frown which says 'You can't possibly believe that'.

This was the look on Ms Soubry's face for virtually the whole hour of Question Time and it annoyed the hell out of me.

  

Weasel Words

I think it was in his last hustings, but I apologise if it was not, Jeremy Corbyn said he was calling for ideas from everybody and anybody about how things could be improved.

This struck me as an eminently sensible idea.  We seem to have got so used to our leaders telling us that this is how it is going to be, that this is what we want, that many, of us, myself included gave up bothering.  We had no voice, no-one cared what we thought, our political masters had the answers which they presented every so often in the form of a party manifesto.  If they were elected they took this as a sign that everybody who voted for them agreed with every policy in the manifesto, and thus mandated them to carry out that policy.

The truth was somewhat different.  Those of us who actually bothered to listen to what they were saying would weigh up the different policies, balance that with our recent experience, and choose the least bad manifesto.  It might be that all the manifestos contained policies which we disliked so we ignored those particular policies while making our decision.  The parties however continue the fiction and claim they have a mandate when in reality they have no such thing.

The great majority of the electorate however merely voted for whichever party they had voted for before, or if that party had done something which they disapproved of, the party opposite.  For a while the Lib Dems seemed to hold the possibility of a third approach to politics, something which they effectively destroyed by siding with one of the big two and thus betraying (at least in the eyes of supporters) their electorate.

Enter UKIP.

Led by the Chief Weasel himself, Sir Nigel de Farage, Nige, no doubt, to his friends. 

Let us consider UKIP for a moment, because UKIP, while only managing to win one seat in 2015 nevertheless managed to bring about the downfall of a Prime Minister.  This happened, I believe (pace Owen Smith), because David Cameron fundamentally failed to understand the demographic of the party.  

He knew that there were deep divisions within his own party on the subject of the EU.  He also knew that at some point something would have to be done to address this.  Two Tory MPs defected to UKIP and he obviously feared that more would follow.  In his manifesto for the 2015 General Election he faced this head on and promised an in/out referendum within the lifetime of the parliament.  Well we all know how that went and bye bye Dave.

David Cameron assumed that because MPs from his party were defecting to UKIP and that the Chief weasel was an ex-public school, ex-city man, that it was a direct threat to the Tory Party.

In fact UKIP is a chimera.  It has as its head right-wing disaffected Tories.  The main body of its support though, comes not from the squeezed middle classes and the naturally fascist privileged classes. although I am sure they are sympathetic, but most of the support came from the disaffected working class, concerned that immigration was the cause of their woes. They inflicted a lot of damage on the Labour party in the General Election and used the referendum to give those they thought had let them down a bloody nose.

Those who used UKIP to achieve their desires, the leaving of the EU, used every old trick in the book.  They nostalgically talked of 'being great again', of 'taking back control', of 'controlling our own borders', of 'not taking orders from unelected (b)eurocrats in Brussels', and they pulled the oldest stunt known to nationalists the world over, they blamed foreign migrants for their/our woes. 

It was what they didn't say which was more significant.  The question of migration is an extremely complex one at the best of times.  This time it was further complicated by a flood of millions of refugees fleeing from wars in the middle east. So migrants might be either refugees from conflict, economic migrants from sub-Saharan Africa, migrants from non-EU countries coming either to work or to study, and EU migrants coming to work as is their right. These are all conflated in the minds of many, something I believe (sorry Owen again) was a deliberate policy on the part of those politicians in favour of leaving.

Anyway whatever the reasons behind it we are now faced with a situation where many working class voters have moved from Labour to UKIP, it is definitely a problem which needs to be addressed in a very positive way by the Labour Party if it is to have any chance of victory.  The party cannot do that by introducing swingeing limits to migration.  In fact in reality no party could. The NHS would collapse as would much of the agricultural and horticultural sectors.  Seasonal jobs in fruit and veg picking exist in large numbers.  It is hard work and many locals don't want and can't afford to do seasonal work.  Eastern European migrant workers can earn enough in the picking season to see them through the winter in their own countries where the cost of living is significantly lower than here.  Stopping these migrants from coming would not significantly improve the lives of the local unemployed.  Similarly many EU migrants and also many from outside the EU are vital to the running of the NHS.  We just do not have enough qualified personnel to fill all the posts.

I could go on but I would merely be repeating stuff we have all heard many times before.

The real problem can be laid at the door of global 'free-market' capitalism and the destruction of the manufacturing and other industries in this country.  If you replace traditional manufacturing with service industries, these service industries will only thrive if people have money to spend on them.  Otherwise everything will be done on credit, which is great right up until the moment the bailiffs knock on the door.

Jeremy Corbyn had said "Nobody left behind'.  It is a great slogan, a great concept, and represents a hell of a task when it comes to convincing the dispossessed and disadvantaged that it means that money will be spent on making sure their lives not just better but actually good.  If everybody had enough to live on and a decent affordable place to live, decent schools for their kids and a properly functioning health service, do you think that the prospect of looking after a few more Middle Eastern refugees would create so much dissatisfaction?

If we cannot convince those who believed the half truths and downright lies peddled by the likes of Farage, then what is the likely scenario when the realise that 'taking back power' didn't mean that they would have any sort of a say, merely that their political masters would run things on their behalf as usual?  When making Britain great again was a meaningless phrase?  That controlling migration meant that they had no A&E department within 50 miles and when you got there you had to wait for twelve hours before seeing an overworked junior doctor waiting for a reply to his job application in Australia?  By then it may be too late. 

I watched a short film made by Owen Jones in Nuneaton, a bellwether seat.  It is in paces like this that those who have moved to UKIP must be won back.  In 2014 just 6% of the population there were born outside the UK, not a particularly high figure, yet voters seemed to have moved to UKIP because of the perceived problem of immigration.  We must convince them that we can make life good enough for them that migration is not a problem.  Unless we succeed we are in for a bumpy ride and the UK could become a country of which I would be ashamed to be a citizen.  

I've got a little list

Yesterday Jeremy Corbyn produced his best performance at PMQs.  You don't have to take my word for it.  Even Laura Kuenssberg was impressed and we all know how pro-Corbyn  she is. Later the same evening he faced the smiling Babe Magnet of Barry Island (sorry that alliterates better than Pontypridd) that is Owen Smith in the last of what has become an increasingly irrelevant, irritating and bad tempered series of hustings.  Jeremy Corbyn sets out his vision for how we might change the way we do things in this country and outlines some of the reasons for this.  Owen Smith says 'Yes, I agree Jeremy, but you cannot do it.'

When pressed as to why Corbyn can't do it he says that it is because he, Smith, has no confidence in Corbyn as a leader, in fact he doesn't believe that Corbyn wants to win at all.  'Unite behind me,'  he says.  'I am the only person who can unite the party,' he says.

When further pressed for evidence of any sort to back up his beliefs he is less vocal.  Indeed he can cite none of any substance.  What we are experiencing here is 'the leap of faith'. The leap of faith is an essential part of any religion.  All religions require a belief in a higher being, usually a deity.  There is never any direct evidence to prove the existence of this deity and therefore believers are required to make a 'leap of faith'.  Belief without proof.

What is odd here is that, firstly we are not dealing with the otherworld which is religion we are very much dealing with the real world.  The world of food banks; homelessness; zero-hours contracts; exorbitant rents; transport chaos; a health service starved of cash and being dismantled before our very eyes; a welfare system in which the safety net it represents is so ripped that in most cases it no longer catches those it it is designed to protect.  

And secondly it is not we the public who are being asked to make the initial leap of faith, it is Smith himself. We are being asked to make a leap of faith over a leap of faith.  Owen Smith does no know the things he asserts are true, he just believes them and then we are being asked to believe in his beliefs, unlikely though they are.  

On the surface I find very little to argue with him in the policies he is espousing.  Two major stumbling blocks for me would be Trident and a new EU referendum.  

I have always been opposed to nuclear weapons, and the idea of a deterrent is to my mind utterly futile.  If at any point international relations were to break down to such an extent that either side would contemplate using nuclear weapons, then us having a few of our own will make not the blindest bit of difference.  We do not need to be part of this charade but the more nationalistic among us look back to that glorious time when Britain ruled the waves, or at least those bits not ruled by the Dutch or the French, and go all moist at the thought of Vanguard class submarines ceaselessly patrolling beneath the waves, Trident missiles primed to see off Johnny Foreigner. God help us.

The other stumbling block as I have said is our response to the result of the EU referendum. I have already made my views clear on what I think about the Boy David and his reckless gamble. We lost. Get over it.  I believe above almost all else in democracy.  Let the people choose although it is not easy when the public is self evidently so stupid that it votes differently from me.  

A genuine democrat cannot choose which decision he accepts and which he rejects.  It is a bitter pill and to sweeten it we need to do a lot of work with our electoral system.  There is absolutely no reason for rejecting proportional representation as a much fairer method.  And I speak as someone who voted to reject AV when it was offered to us.  I did not want AV because I think it is, to use current terminology, PR lite.  It was more of a nod towards the demands of the Lib Dem part of the coalition than a serious attempt to make our system fair. If one of the consequences of PR is a greater representation in Parliament of UKIP then who can dispute the fact that they won enough votes to justify a larger voice.  It would also give seats to the likes of the Greens, another party sidelined by our current system.

In the case of the referendum however there was no voting system to blame.  It was a binary choice, in or out and every vote counted.  To come running, saying we were lied to is no excuse. The remain side had ample opportunity to point this out.  That they failed to do so is no reason to re-run the vote.

The fact that Owen Smith bases his entire campaign on borrowed policies, a flawed leap of faith, a blatant disregard for simple democratic choice and an unbelievably inflated opinion of his own abilities, mean that I would not support him whoever he was standing against.  There is much rumour that he is a stalking horse for David Miliband.  We shall have to wait and see.

There is already much evidence that Mrs May's safe pair of hands may not be as safe as was first claimed.  Again we shall have to wait and see. It is an interesting thought though that at PMQs she made much of her own grammar school education.  It is true that she attended Holton Park Girls' Grammar School in Holton, Oxfordshire.  What she failed to mention was that in 1971 at which time Mrs May or as she was then Theresa Brasier was fourteen years of age, it became a co-educational comprehensive school, so, unless she was some sort of incredibly precocious child genius Mrs May took both her O and A levels at a comprehensive school.  Despite this obvious handicap she still made it to Oxford, albeit to read geography, the last refuge of the desperate, at least in those days.  She got a second class degree.  Whether it was a 2:1 or a 2:2 is not clear.

To finish, it seems that somebody has decided to leak a list of those Labour MPs who have been attacking Mr Corbyn in public, both in print and in social media.  There is much wailing from those named.  This is frequently the response of playground bullies who are caught in the act.  If they have behaved in a manner which is entirely honourable let them come out and demonstrate it, for they can have nothing to fear.  If there is truth in the allegations implied in this list, and I am making no judgement, and have not seen the list, then what are they complaining about? Anybody can make a list.  I don't doubt that those opposed to Mr Corbyn also have their own lists. We, my wife and I, make a list before we go shopping.  It means we do not forget anything.