Sea Change

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More funding or defunding? It's time for the hard left to make up its mind.

As a young teenager in the early 1980s, I remember chatting to someone involved with the Labour Party hard left. He was of the firm view that the Metropolitan Police should be wound up. While I don’t recall this position being particularly mainstream, the policy of the hard-left administration on the Greater London Council at the time was certainly that police officers should become local authority employees. Yes, they were planning to defund the police nearly 40 years ago. The Brixton riots of 1981 had been sparked by aggressive policing of young black men and officious use of stop and search. In an era of recession, high unemployment and social tension, we saw a huge ideological rift between the Thatcher government (which stood for authoritarian law and order policies) and leftists of various persuasions who flew the red flag over town halls from Sheffield and Liverpool to Brent, Haringey and Lambeth. The London politics of the era were shaped by figures such as John McD

Paracetamol just isn't going to cut it

We all love the NHS. We all rely on it. We all have amazing and positive stories to tell. But we all know its flaws. We tend not to talk about them too much because we’re grateful for the amazing concept that lies behind the service. The whole system is a phenomenal slice of socialism. It says we can turn up at a doctor’s surgery or hospital and get treated for free, regardless of who we are or how much money we have. Although there are other ways of organising universal healthcare provision – we can see some of them in parts of continental Europe, for instance – there is something incredibly comforting and efficient about the British state service. But it is time to get real. If the NHS is prepared for the forthcoming coronavirus epidemic, I’m a trapeze artist at Billy Smart’s Circus. The government will tell you that we are battle ready, but surveys of people who actually work in the service will tell you categorically we are not. It’s not just a

Slumbering Labour needs a wake-up call

The public is saying what no one in the Labour Party dares to admit. Just take a look at the commentary that has come out of Lord Ashcroft’s detailed research. The Conservative pollster has a sample of 10,000 voters and no fewer than 18 focus groups in which people’s concerns are laid bare. My God, it makes grim reading for Corbynistas and all the facilitators of their disastrous regime over the past few years. Labour is seen as ‘mostly for students, the unemployed and middle-class radicals’. It seems to ‘disdain…mainstream views’ and ‘disapprove of success’. The manifesto published at the end of last year? Pie in the sky. The party can’t be trusted on finance. It’s too left-wing. No priorities. No understanding of aspiration or prosperity. The report is particularly heartbreaking for those of us who warned consistently of the folly of pursuing a hard-left agenda with veteran losers like Corbyn and McDonnell. You’d think that after the catastrophic defeat on 12 th

The friends, the facilitators and the failures. They now owe us all an apology.

I keep hearing Corbyn’s tenure referred to as an experiment. But how many experiments continue for four years, despite a toxic chemical haze billowing out of the mad inventor’s lab? The hard-left project should have been stopped in its tracks countless times. As far back as 2015, Joe Haines – Harold Wilson’s Press Secretary – suggested that the Parliamentary Labour Party should make a unilateral declaration of independence. They could have appointed their own leader in Parliament and bypassed the socialist relic the members had chosen to elect. Instead, they prevaricated. They agonised. They muttered to each other in corridor recesses at Westminster. The frightened bunnies were at first bemused and disoriented, allowing Corbyn and his cabal to consolidate their position. And subsequently, they were frightened. Mainly frightened of the swollen membership of three-quid flotsam and jetsam who had invaded their constituencies pledging allegiance to the sage of the allotments

The hard choices XR must now make

It may be that the folk in Extinction Rebellion don’t care if they win friends and influence people. Perhaps they believe that a small group of activists can disrupt society so much and for so long that everyone decides to acquiesce to their demands? The Suffragettes, for example, didn’t mess about. They chained themselves to railings, smashed windows and threw themselves in front of horses in a bid to win women the right to vote. If they’d played nicey-nicey, the male establishment might just have shrugged. But there’s one important difference between these two movements. Campaigners for women’s suffrage were addressing a specific and fundamental injustice that could potentially be corrected through legislation. By 1928, women had the same voting rights as men by law. There was a focused goal and after a generation of struggle, it was achieved. That very basic demand was a platform on which later feminists would build. Suffrage on its own, after all, doesn’t deliver equali

Use your vote wisely. And then pray.

There’s only one desirable outcome to any general election at the end of 2019, but unfortunately it’s not something that any of us can vote for. We need another hung parliament. Preferably one that allows a little more room for mathematical manoeuvre and – critically - one in which both Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn have both suffered a severe setback. Never in modern history have both the major parties been simultaneously so unfit to govern. Johnson has transformed the Conservative Party into radical right-wing movement, intent on delivering Brexit come what may and winning back the votes lost to Nigel Farage’s movement. Dominic Cummings serves as a Rasputin-like figure in the court of Tsar Boris, seemingly responsible for devious plotting and manipulation. But he is just one figure in a coterie of hardline advisers and ministers that the Prime Minister has gathered around him. The Tories break with constitutional norms and even threaten to defy the law. The