I am bound by my duty to you my readers to comment on the demotion to plain ‘Mr’ of Andrew Windsor. Long overdue. Now it’s over to Keir Starmer to kick-start the process of stripping a certain other chum of Epstein of his peerage. If a prince can fall so can a lord. Let’s not see any more dithering!

 The Labour Party’s mission in life was since its inception to win parliamentary seats—as those on the left were always told, your principles mean nothing without power. Now it seems power means nothing as well, and it looks like the Starmer mission to destroy the Labour Party is on track. I believe somebody coined the phrase ‘a bird needs two wings to fly’ and the Starmeroids’ obsession with turning the party into a vehicle for barely perceptible change built on a single cylinder of disciplinary dictatorship has shown what a clapped out version of ‘power’ really means. The fight over small differences which is the current ‘battle’ for the deputy leadership demonstrates this. There is no battle over ideas or what to do with power once you’ve got it. So Starmer is on a roll, and it’s downhill all the way. The Caerphilly by-election result should have every Labour MP quaking in their boots (if not quacking like a flock of distressed ducks). If Starmer wants to prevent Fartage becoming prime minister, he could still effect change, and the first thing to look at would be to introduce proportional representation for Westminster elections.

France seems to be going through a period of rather bad karma, starting perhaps with the Notre Dame fire. At least that has been restored. The latest episode was the theft of the French crown jewels from the Louvre, and you’d think that as the building started off as a fortress they may have been better protected. In between the fire and the theft we’ve witnessed Macron’s misplacing his parliamentary majority and subsequent exits of various prime ministers, and the slightly surreal sight of former president Sarkozy sauntering down a street to start a five-year prison sentence for illicit election funding offences. Where’s Victor Hugo when you need him? I’m struggling to find much merit in the wonders of ‘meritocracy’ which I thought was what our system  was supposedly good at delivering. At least there is merit in a judicial system which is capable of punishing those at the top of the political greasy pole. Of course, soliciting money from Col. Ghaddafi is on a quite different scale to soliciting your attire from a member of the House of Lords. That’s not illegal. But generally in the UK money in politics is not a subject that gets much judicial attention. I’ve wondered off the subject of France a bit there. Here’s a joke (!) made by Margaret Thatcher (!) recorded by Roy Jenkins in a meeting from his days as President of the then EEC Commission (circa 1980):
 
‘She then suddenly swept into a fantasy about taking the Crown jewels with her on a forthcoming trip to Paris and using them to soften Giscard, who was temporarily immersed in the Bokassa diamonds scandal.* It was a good taste-bad taste joke, but as with many people who have made one she immediately backtracked.’ (Roy Jenkins: A Life At The Centre, Macmillan, 1991 p.496)
 
*It was alleged that President Giscard D’Estang had received a couple of diamonds from President Bokassa of the Central African Republic, sold them and kept the proceeds.
 
So, now that Macron is to lend us some old tapestry or other, perhaps we could lend him our Crown Jewels? It seems some French people believe he is their emperor after all.

You’ve got to hand to ‘em, the British royal family must be the Greatest Soap on Earth. ‘Prince’ Andrew’s latest travails could surely be scripted into Eastenders, but he doesn’t need to be, he is by his own merits an excellent reminder that these royals are just like the rest of us. He even eats at Pizza Express! (He said) So it was entertaining to read in the Faber Book of Diaries whilst sipping a happy hour G&T two diary entries from 1936:
 
8th December
 
The Simpson crisis has been a delight to everyone. At Maide’s nursing home they report a pronounced turn for the better in adult patients. There can seldom have been an event which has caused so much general delight and so little pain. Reading the papers and even listening to announcements that there was no news on the wireless took up most of the week.   
- Evelyn Waugh
 
11th December
 
On Saturday I drove with the children to Croydon. Dad was out when we got there. When he came back he looked unhappy and restless, and began to shout as he always does when he’s unhappy, about how he hated the Monarchy, but how there had to be humbug. I could see that his conscience was troubled. He told me how, on one occasion when Baldwin went to see the King, how he found him quite drunk, and how he picked up a glass of wine to throw, and greeted him with ‘Well, you fornicating old son of a bitch, what do you want now?' I said my only regret was that he didn’t throw the glass.  
- Malcolm Muggeridge

Yes indeed, we Brits need a bit of humbug to cheer us all up . . . 

I come back to the Burnham/Rotherham book Head North. Their ambitions are laid out in their ‘10 point plan’ which covers things like constitutional reform (e.g make the House of Lords a directly elected senate and introduce proportional representation), introduce a basic law like Germany’s which dictates that government spending should seek to give citizens equivalent standards of living, make the educational system recognise vocational skills as being just as important as going to university, more control over transport and so on—all good stuff. What’s missing is a proposal to tackle the world of finance, that is the influence and power of the City aka the Square Mile. The authors’ emphasis on ‘place matters’ has long ago been adopted by the City, which has retained its special privileges, influence and power for centuries. The Corporation of the City of London, which maintains its own police force and counts businesses amongst its 10,000 electorate is emblematic of the power of ‘the City’ more generally. It jealously defends this status partly through the office of ’The Remembrancer,’ an office which dates back 450 years. The holder of this office is entitled to sit in the chamber of the House of Commons (but with no vote or speaking rights) as part of their duties to monitor legislation. Illustrated below is part of an earlier year’s Remembrancer’s office plan. Yes, looks just like something lobbyists would get up to—but lobbyists don’t get to sit in the Chamber (and if they can sit in the Chamber, where else do they have a seat?) 
 
I confess that in all my nine years in parliament I was never aware of the Remembrancer. I was inclined to see the chaps in their silly costumes carrying cushions on sticks at e.g. the Queen’s speech as a set of doddery flunkeys who were granted the honour for past brown nosing services to the monarch. But they are representative of a powerful coterie/nexus of individuals with more than just inheritance tax hikes to worry about: they are a crucial display of tradition which even—even—Labour prime ministers lose sleep over. Or maybe just turn over and go back to sleep with (metaphorically speaking).
 
If Burnham and Rotherham want to advance place-based politics, they need to examine the power of the UK’s most significantly influential place. Despite the City’s role in the UK economy being examined ad nauseam I’m not sure anyone has really looked at the minutiae of how its ingrained influence works. We could of course ask Nigel Fartage—he was (and is) I believe part of it. Burnham and Rotherham don’t talk about the City.
 
I am reminded that Head North tells us that just 50 people run the country. It says maybe half of them are elected. Some will be civil servants of course. There will be some others. Who could they be?​

So I did it and voted for Lucy Powell in Labour’s deputy leader’s race. If this becomes public knowledge it may damage her chances, but who knows? It could be that a great many continuing members wavered over a qualifying question ‘do you support the policies of the Labour Party?’ Very few could answer yes to that. Many might want to differentiate between the policies of the Labour Party they thought they were in and those of the leader who currently runs it. Another qualifying question (both of these required a tick box tick) was whether I support another party. Well at the moment the answer is no, but tomorrow that could change. I suspect quite a few supporters of other parties, not least Reform UK may also be trade union members who won’t be as fastidious as me ticking these boxes. But like me they may look at the choice and think why bother?
 
I watched on You Tube speeches  given in Liverpool by Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana. Both were actually quite impressive, but speaking to a home crowd is one thing. It’s a pity Jeremy didn’t show the same passion when he was being interrogated by Andrew Neil before the 2019 general election. His sense of certainty is strong amongst supporters, but he’s not made for the current media age. Zarah probably is. 

I was a bit surprised the other day to receive an email inviting me to cast my vote in the Labour Party’s deputy leadership contest, bearing in mind that I had resigned my membership over a year ago. It eventually dawned on me that as a member of an affiliated trade union, I still had a say. What to do? Which of the two candidates, who were both cabinet ministers throughout Starmer’s first year in government is the stand out carrier of a left-wing flame? It seems Lucy Powell is the deputy leader Starmer doesn’t want, so I’ll probably vote for her, if I vote at all. Really, there’s so little between them but with a week to go the knives are coming out and the fight over small differences could be revealing.

Meanwhile I’m working my way through Head North, the political testimony of northern mayors Andy Burnham and Steve Rotherham. So far I have learnt that only 50 people (positions and names not named) run the country; the Treasury’s ’Green Book’ as a matter of policy disadvantages the North through  its Cost Benefit Analysis of where public money produces the greatest returns and last but not least ’Westminster,’ that thoroughly dysfunctional English portmanteau of sins is to blame in good part for everything. I’m moving into the second part of the book which is about solutions. A ten-point plan, in fact. All will be revealed.

Ideas can take some time to work their way through the system, but that’s just something we have to live with. Christ was around 2.000 years ago but his creed still hasn’t convinced everybody. On a more modest scale, my proposal of circa. 2016 that Scarborough should declare itself a town of culture has finally resonated. My blog of 25th January 2018 is evidence of my prescience, now that Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy is seeking nominations for a Town of Culture. Local MP Alison Hume supports Scarborough (and/or Whitby, how could you not) taking this title. For a reasonable fee I would be happy to act as a consultant, after all, I HAD THE IDEA FIRST. It’s not often you get to say things like that. That’s a fee plus expenses by the way, I think a lot of travel might be involved, fact finding and all that.

Where would capitalism be without its critics? Át least from the time of Marx capitalism has been analysed and torn to pieces, and perhaps one could conjecture that without the reactions against it it may have been more rampant in its creative destructiveness. But reading The Invisible Doctrine by George Monbiot and Peter Hutchison (Penguin 2025) it seems clear that capitalism was always rampant, with little restraint. True, people in political power have occasionally called it out, from FD Roosevelt to even Ted Heath’s ‘the unpleasant and unacceptable face of capitalism’ remark but more often in the benign phraseology of ‘a mixed economy’ or ‘the third way’ politicians bend their knee to the inevitability of capitalism’s power, a power which it is said triumphed in the 1990s with the collapse of the Soviet Union.
 
It is trendy to talk these days of ‘late capitalism,’ which is suggestive of its impending death. I would suggest this scenario is implausible, since one of capitalism’s great powers is its transformative ability. Monbiot and Hutchison place the origins of capitalism in the growth of colonialism and slavery, and follow its development through a cycle of ‘boom, bust, quit’ before re-emerging in a refreshed but recognisably similar form. It may be that the state has intervened more pro-actively in its management, e.g. U.S. anti-trust laws of the early 1900s and the Glass-Steagal Act of the 1930s placing constraints on banking activity, to the UK’s nationalisations of the 1940s. Capitalism has overcome all these challenges, most often through its grip on political power.
 
That power isn’t always channelled through dark money. Personal ambition is a key driver. Take this example:
 
'Basically I understood aspiration. I like people who want to succeed and admire people who do. When I was at the Bar—and the seven years I spent as a full-time barrister were immensely formative for me in many ways—I did a lot of commercial and industrial work and got on well with the risk-takers, those who don’t mope around, who had ‘get up and go’. I hate class, but I love aspiration. It’s why I like America. I adore that notion of coming from nothing and making something of yourself.
 
Our writer continues:
 
 '. .  nevertheless I sometimes underestimated the ruthlessness and amorality that can go with moneymaking. Don’t misunderstand me: many business people can be creative people for whom money is the consequence of their success, rather than the motivation. But others don’t give a damn.'
 
This could be a toolmaker’s son writing of course, but no it’s Tony Blair (A Journey, Hutchinson 2010 p.115 and of whom a book was written entitled Blair Inc c.f. previous blogs) ’Others don’t give a damn’ - Blair says in this disarming admission of innocence and capturing his lack of ideological analysis, that most despicable conceptual activity. It is an important feature of Monbiot and Hutchison’s book to point out that a certain ideology is all around us, hence the ‘invisible doctrine.’ Blair was as ideological as they come, in tune with all the then great riffs of capitalism, ‘get up and go,’ ‘not moping around,’ ‘making something of yourself’ and perhaps most importantly of all ’hating class.’ The class system was abolished! How was this achieved?
 
Alistair Darling wrote in his memoir of his time as Gordon Brown’s Chancellor of the Exchequer:
 
'Living standards were rising for most people but not for all. People on middle to low incomes, especially those with no children or whose children had left home, were beginning to feel the squeeze well before the crash of 2007. The ’squeezed middle’ is neither a new or peculiarly British political problem.  It has been a growing feature of most developed countries for more than two decades. But generally, most people felt better off. In addition to the annual holiday, there would be a second break, weekends away. Low-cost airlines thrived as more and more people acquired the means to take breaks abroad. A lot of this was fuelled by increased borrowing and the running up of credit-card bills. People did this on the back of the security that comes when you see the value of your home increase each year and you do not fear losing your job. (Back From The Brink: 1,000 days at Number 11, Atlantic Books 2011 pp. 7/8 emphasis added)
 
Then the house of cards came tumbling down, thanks to the complacency that the mirage of economic growth had spawned (to mix metaphors). As Darling wrote after becoming Chancellor, everything seemed ‘tranquil’ after a decade of growth. It seems he had to learn a lot in the subsequent years. And this despite saying that the squeezed middle and lower income earners were being increasingly squeezed over the previous two decades—the entirety and more of the New Labour government’s time in office. It is hard to detect that today’s Labour government (of all people so to speak), has learnt anything from the financial crash. It’s like Gordon Brown saved the (banking) world by co-ordinating their bail-out and such is the financial world’s gratitude they are once again telling the Chancellor how to do her job, and it has to be said she seems keen to listen. The financial crash was so yesterday. Nothing has changed.
 
As with all books on the dysfunctional aspects of our civilisation, one wants to rush to the end of the analysis to find in the final chapter an answer to the question ‘What can you (or we) do about it?’ The solution is we’re told to be found in a Restorative Story, one that can be easily disseminated and understood, as well as explained and will appeal. Monbiot and Hutchison suggest a few components, many of which will be familiar to people on the green/left/co-operative axis. Bottom-up decision making essentially combined with more localism. The message is the rich need us more than we need them, and unlike Tony Blair we can create society with our own hands, not have a version of it thrust upon us by the rich and their multiple elites. All well and good, but as the authors acknowledge, those elites currently wield the power (which they amply demonstrated in the defenestration of one Jeremy Corbyn, who is not mentioned in this book).
 
I bought The Invisible Doctrine on my trip to Sheffield yesterday, and Waterstones had a buy one get one half price offer on which encouraged me to buy Head North, by the mayors of Greater Manchester and Liverpool, Andy Burnham and Steve Rotherham respectively. They have a ten point plan for making Britain (or at least the North) equal. I will read and compare. Both authors wield some power, and it seems one of them at least is getting up the noses of the Starmeroids. How I wonder will their proposals create a ‘Restorative Story?’ I will read it and find out.

+Kemi Badenoch gave her leader’s speech at the Tory Party conference today and it seems that it was rousing’ (Independent) and may well preserve her leadership for a little while longer—taking  a leaf out of Starmer’s book which was also considered ‘rousing.’ Both speeches will quickly be forgotten athough given her unfunded promise of tax cuts Badenoch will soon be compared to Liz Truss. I do wish when our ‘leaders’ talk of tax cuts and ‘balancing the budget’ (which they never do) they could make plainer their aspirations to destroy public services a bit clearer. And of course on who’s behalf they’re doing it.
 
+I enjoyed a day trip to Sheffield today, courtesy of Northern Rail with a £4 return ticket. It takes as long to get to Sheffield on their direct service as it does to go to London. Anyway, I picked up a copy of the free newspaper Metro which very succinctly reported that globally renewable energy has outstripped energy from coal for the first time. At the same time Reuters reported that the idiot Trump is considering cancelling all federal funding for renewable energy development. Perhaps that means he’s very pleased with the advances of clean energy. It was thanks to government support for clean energy that it can now out-compete fossil fuels. Nuclear lobbyists take note. But the old is not going out without a fight, and they are gaining ground in the smoke filled corridors of populist idiots, including Badenoch and to a lesser extent our very own Tony Blair.
 
+The shadow Home Secretary Robert Jenrick is proving to be very much a prick. His comments that on a visit to some place in the Midlands (it’s all merged together in my view) which lasted fully 90 minutes he didn’t spot a white face showed that ‘proper’ integration wasn’t happening. I’m waiting to hear about his next trip to somewhere like the Cotswolds. I imagine he may have to wait longer than 90 minutes to see a black face, unless they all have servants in Chipping Norton. Some people have suggested that Jenrick is playing the race card. His denials don’t quite ring true. I wonder what he really thinks about having a black woman leader—a migrant from Nigeria to boot—not that that would have any influence on his apparent desire to replace her.