Jeremy Corbyn, Northern Ireland, and the Falkland Islands, by David Lindsay

Northern Ireland was Britain’s Vietnam. It dragged on for years. And it ended in that most abject of defeats, when all political and popular support at home has dried up, and when the penny has dropped that the local guerrillas are never going to go anywhere because they have nowhere else to go.

The Vietnam veterans were shunned for a long time. None of them has ever become President, and now none of them ever will. By contrast, the people who opposed the war, even those who did everything short (if that) of backing the other side, came to be treated as having been right all along, and continue to be so treated.

The factual accuracy or even the morality of all of this is not the point. It is the political reality, both in relation to Vietnam in the United States, and in relation to Northern Ireland in Britain.

The bafflement and even hurt of the military lobby that no one cares about its gripes against Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell bespeaks an unawareness that the English and the Welsh, at least, have profoundly distrusted their own Army since 250 years before even the Old IRA was created, and have historically tolerated it only because most of it was abroad most of the time.

The only exception to this was during and immediately after the Second World War, but resentment of National Service rapidly revived the old attitudes. Can there be another country on earth where the mere existence of the Army has to be approved by Parliament every five years?

Then there are the causes in which that lobby takes issue with Corbyn and McDonnell, both of whom were elected as London MPs during the Troubles, in Corbyn’s case four times.

Ken Livingstone also managed that three times, and he went on to win two London-wide elections, in no small measure on the back of his prescience with regard to Northern Ireland; the serious prospect of his becoming Leader, as indeed he did, did not stop a Labour victory in the elections to the GLC even in 1981.

There are other examples that could be cited. Thus has spoken, over and over again, the city that bore the brunt of the IRA’s campaign, whatever leafy Home Counties hacks may think. It is singularly disagreeable to expect the price of one’s principles to be paid by other people.

In truth, mainstream Mainland opinion always included a very pronounced steak of resentment at having to pay, whether in blood or in treasure, for a Unionist tribe across the water that was incomprehensible when viewed from over here. By the end, popular feeling in Britain simply refused any longer to tolerate the intransigent entitlement that it saw as the root of the problem. Never in Britain has Northern Ireland been a popular cause. 

But even in Northern Ireland, Unionists of the old school, whose position seems to be presupposed as common sense and common decency by the more securocratic sections of the media, are now lucky to take two per cent of the vote, and never manage three per cent.

One Irish Republican bomb in London would now lead to an immediate and unilateral British withdrawal from Northern Ireland, whether or not the Republic would take it, and no matter who wanted us to stay. They would hardly be the first people whom Britain had simply upped and left behind. We have done that on every continent.

But no such bomb is going to be set off, because the Republican leaders have never had it so good. The political system is designed entirely for their convenience. Former British soldiers of the same generation are preparing to be brought back to stand trial. If the IRA was riddled with British agents, then was it to those agents that Britain surrendered?

There was more public support for the Falkland Islands when they had been invaded. But they are not going to be invaded again. The world has moved on.

Latin American interests would instead threaten to move to somewhere else more jobs in the United Kingdom than there were people on the Falkland Islands. There are fewer than three thousand people on the Falkland Islands. Thatcher’s original scheme for a transfer of sovereignty, followed by a leaseback, would then be a done deal.

As it probably would be if there were any serious threat of a second invasion. People on the Falkland Islands do not pay tax in this country. Nevertheless, a Labour Government would not dare be seen to sign over the Falklands. So Argentina and its allies would only play either of these cards while there was a Conservative Government in Britain.

The very last threat to the present situation, therefore, would be the prospect of Jeremy Corbyn as Prime Minister.

@davidaslindsay

To Tidy Up the Shambolic Laws on Sexual Offences, by David Lindsay

It is time for Parliament to tidy up the shambolic laws on sexual offences.

First, the age of consent should effectively be raised to 18, by making it a criminal offence for anyone to commit any sexual act with or upon any person under that age who was more than two years younger than herself, or to incite any such person to commit any such act with or upon her or any third party anywhere in the world.

The maximum sentence would be twice the difference in age, to the month where that was less than three years, or a life sentence where that difference was at least five years. No different rules for “positions of trust”, which are being used against male, but not female, 18-year-olds looking after female, but not male, Sixth Formers visiting universities.

And no provision, as at present, for boys to be prosecuted at any age, even if they are younger than the girls involved, whereas girls have to be 16. The law on indecent images is also enforced in totally different ways in relation to boys and girls of the same age, and even to boys who are younger than the girls. That must end.

Children under the age of consent can have abortion or contraception without parental permission. That is an argument for banning children under the age of consent from having abortion or contraception without parental permission.

Unless they decided as adults to seek to make contact with their children, then the financial liability of male victims for pregnancies resulting from their sexual abuse ought also to be ruled out. Talk about victim-blaming.

Secondly, it ought to be made a criminal offence for anyone aged 21 or over to buy or sell sex, with equal sentencing on both sides. No persecution of girls and very young women whose lives had already been so bad that they had become prostitutes. No witch-hunting of boys and very young men who were desperate to lose their virginities. But the treatment of women and men as moral, intellectual and legal equals.

Thirdly, the replacement of the offences of rape, serious sexual assault, and sexual assault, with aggravating circumstances to the general categories of offences against the person, enabling the sentences to be doubled. The sex of either party would be immaterial.

There must be no anonymity either for adult accusers or for adult complainants. Either we have an open system of justice, or we do not. In this or any other area, there must be no suggestion of any reversal of the burden of proof. That reversal has largely been brought to you already, by the people who in the same year brought you the Iraq War. The Parliament that was supine before Tony Blair was also supine before Harriet Harman. Adults who made false allegations ought to be prosecuted automatically.

Moreover, how can anyone be convicted of non-consensual sex, who could not lawfully have engaged in consensual sex? If there is an age of consent, then anyone below it can be an assailant. But a sexual assailant? How? Similarly, if driving while intoxicated is a criminal offence, then how can intoxication, in itself, be a bar to sexual consent? The law needs to specify that it was, only to such an extent as would constitute a bar to driving.

And fourthly, obscenity ought to be defined as material depicting acts that were themselves illegal, or which was reasonably likely to incite or encourage such acts. Sentencing would be the same as for the illegal act in question in each case.

American-style legislation for internally administered “balance of probabilities” or “preponderance of evidence” tests to sexual assault allegations at universities or elsewhere must be banned by Statute. It is incompatible with the Rule of Law to punish someone for a criminal offence of which she has not been convicted.

As for teaching things in schools, how is that curriculum time currently being filled? Apply the Eton Test. Would this be taught in a school that assumed its pupils to be future Prime Ministers or Nobel Laureates? If not, then instead fill the hours with something that was. Teach Latin. Someone will.

Convictions under laws predating these changes ought to be annulled along with those of men whose homosexual acts would not be criminal offences today. Labour should vote against that unless it also annulled, not only all convictions in the above categories, but also all convictions and other adverse court decisions arising out of Clay Cross, Shrewsbury, Wapping, and the three Miners’ Strikes since 1970.

This would set the pattern for all future feminist and LGBT legislation. Without a working-class quid pro quo, then Labour would vote against any such legislation. Alongside the DUP, the Conservative Right, or whoever. It is not Blair’s Labour Party now.

@davidaslindsay

In Anticipation of Cameron’s Single European Act on Speed, by David Lindsay

It is hardly as if Jeremy Corbyn has ever hidden his views on the EU. It is not his fault that no one has ever reported them.

He has suggested a renegotiation that of course he knows would be the exact opposite of that which would ever be brought back by David Cameron. Cameron was elected to conduct that exactly opposite renegotiation, and then to put its conclusion to a referendum. He is going to do both of those things, and that is fine.

Whatever arrangement with the EU has been renegotiated to Cameron’s satisfaction will be horrendous from the point of view of British workers and of the users of British public services. Submitted to a Special Congress of the TUC and to a Special Conference of the Labour Party, it will be rejected overwhelming, even unanimously, thus initiating the entirely correct campaign for a No vote in the referendum.

Big business and almost the entire Conservative Party will line up behind Cameron, since their only objection to the EU is the imaginary “Brussels red tape” that he will have pretended to have cut.

Very occasionally, there is constitutional theory stuff on the outermost fringes of Toryland. But right-wing intellectualism is the most Continental of concepts. It is not about such Bennite concerns to almost anyone on that side. They are just not like that. 

The Government’s latest assault on trade union funding is really designed to attack the only possible source of funding for the No campaign.

The economic, social, cultural and political power of the British working class, whether broadly or narrowly defined, cannot exactly be said to have increased since 1973. Any more than Britain has fought no further wars since joining a body as successful as NATO or nuclear weapons when it comes to keeping the peace.

We had full employment before we joined the EU. We have never had it since. No job in the real economy is dependent on our membership. Or were trade with, and travel to, the Continent unheard of, because impossible, before our accession to the EU?

Not for nothing did Margaret Thatcher support that accession, oppose withdrawal in the 1975 referendum, and go on, as Prime Minister, to sign an act of integration so large that it could never be equalled, a position from which she never wavered until the tragically public playing out of the early stages of her dementia. “No! No! No!” was not part of any planned speech.

In anticipation of Cameron’s Single European Act on speed, Labour needs to get its retaliation in first. Jeremy Corbyn needs to demand immediate legislation.

First, restoring the supremacy of United Kingdom over European Union law, using that provision to repatriate industrial and regional policy as Labour has advocated for some time, using it to repatriate agricultural policy (farm subsidies go back to the War, 30 years before we joined the EU, and they are a good idea in themselves, whereas the Common Agricultural Policy most certainly is not), and using it to restore the United Kingdom’s historic fishing rights of 200 miles or to the median line.

Secondly, requiring that all EU legislation, in order to have any effect in this country, be enacted by both Houses of Parliament as if it had originated in one or the other of them. Thirdly, requiring that British Ministers adopt the show-stopping Empty Chair Policy until such time as the Council of Ministers meets in public and publishes an Official Report akin to Hansard.

Fourthly, disapplying in the United Kingdom any ruling of the European Court of Justice or of the European Court of Human Rights unless confirmed by a resolution of the House of Commons, the High Court of Parliament. That would also deal with whatever the problem was supposed to be with the Human Rights Act.

Fifthly, disapplying in the United Kingdom anything passed by the European Parliament but not by the majority of those MEPs who had been certified as politically acceptable by one or more seat-taking members of the House of Commons. Thus, we should no longer be subject to the legislative will of Stalinists and Trotskyists, of neo-Fascists and neo-Nazis, of members of Eastern Europe’s kleptomaniac nomenklatura, of people who believed the Provisional Army Council to be the sovereign body throughout Ireland, and of Dutch ultra-Calvinists who would not have women candidates.

Sixthly, reducing in real terms the British contribution to the EU Budget; that is another longstanding Labour policy. And seventhly, pre-emptively disapplying in the United Kingdom any Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, thus making any such Agreement impossible in practice. Outside the EU, would Cameron just negotiate something even worse with the United States? Not before 2020, when he would need to be replaced with Corbyn.

All before Cameron even set off for his renegotiation.

After all, which privatisation did the EU prevent? Which dock, factory, shipyard, steelworks or mine did it save? If we needed the EU for the employment law that, since we do not have it, the EU is obviously powerless to deliver, then there would be no point or purpose to the British Labour Movement. Or have the trade unions disbanded, their job done?

Far from preventing wars, the EU has done nothing to prevent numerous on the part of, at some point, most of its member-states, and not least this member-state. It was a key player in, and it has been a major beneficiary of, the destruction of Yugoslavia.

It is now a key player in, and it seeks to be a major beneficiary of, the war in Ukraine, which is the worst on the European Continent since 1945, and which is a direct consequence of the EU’s expansionist desire to prise a vital buffer state out of neutrality and into the NATO from which the EU is practically indistinguishable.

The Leader of the Labour Party has been saying all of this all along, right back to when he voted against the Single European Act and the Maastricht Treaty.

@davidaslindsay

On Possibly Coming Round to Votes at 16, by David Lindsay

I am still not convinced about lowering the voting age. We are being bounced into it because 16 and 17-year-olds voted in the Scottish referendum. But my mind is no longer entirely closed to it.

I remember what it was like to be a politically active Sixth Former. It is not an experience that I shall ever forget. No one who was one could ever imagine that it was, is, or will ever be normal. Even a superbly well-educated 16-year-old is still a 16-year-old.

Lowering the voting age even further might pose a very serious threat to democracy, since no one seriously imagines that the opinion of a 16-year-old matters as much as that of his Head Teacher, or his doctor, or his mother. Why, then, should each of them have only as many votes as he had? Thus might the process start.

Harold Wilson probably thought that he might gain some advantage from lowering the voting age. But the Sixties Swingers hated him (that is largely forgotten now, but it is true), and they handed the 1970 Election to Ted Heath instead.

If there had been a General Election, as was once widely expected, in the spring of 1996, then, having been born in September 1977, I would have been able to vote in that Election, even though I would still have had a couple of months of school left to go. But by then, I had been free for more than two years to walk out any time I liked. I would have had that freedom even if the school-leaving age had been raised to 18, as is now going to happen.

Lowering the voting age to two years below the school-leaving age would literally be giving the vote to children; to people whom we, as a society, had decided were not yet capable of deciding for themselves whether or not they wished to leave full-time education.

It is still well within living memory that most people left school, and went straight into taxpaying work, a full seven years before they were entitled to vote. Now, we propose that people should have the vote two years before they were able to leave school.

If anyone doubts quite how monolithically middle-class our political culture has become, then consider that it has almost certainly never occurred to the proponents of lowering the voting age that even 21 was ever attained before leaving full-time education, never mind a third of one’s life to that date after having done so.

If 16 and 17-year-olds could vote, then why could they not be called up or cajoled into fighting what have become this country’s never-ending wars? When it is said that this change would leave them open to exploitation, then that is what that ought to mean.

And yet, and yet, and yet.

With the introduction of individual registration, I suspect that the proportion of the extremely elderly that remained on the electoral register would be hardly, if at all, higher than the proportion of those all the way up to the age of about 25. 

Of those registered, if 16 and 17-year-olds were able to be so, then I strongly suspect that the franchise would be exercised by a higher proportion of them than of the over-90s, who are also a very small cohort. 

I have seen the way in which candidates press the flesh in nursing homes when there is an election coming up. Some of the residents know exactly what is going on. Others are decidedly confused. Others again hardly know Christmas from Tuesday. 16 and 17-year-olds would be very much the same.

Like a lot of my vintage, I see one third of bus passes used to commute, for much of the year from and to homes heated by the Winter Fuel Allowance. But then I consider that there will be none of those things for us, even though the people now coming into them no more fought in the War than we did. They were no more on this earth than we were while the War was being fought by anyone.

In my more mean-spirited moments, I ponder that people who “worked all their lives” were paid to do so, and ought not to have spent it all, as of course many of them did not, with the result that they are now loaded. Or I ponder that they have not in fact “worked all their lives” if they have retired a mere two thirds of the way through the probable length of their lives.

I make no apology for seeing no War-like debt to be repaid to those whose formative experiences were sex, drugs, rock’n’roll, full employment, cheap housing, student grants, public ownership, municipal services, the explosion of mass consumer affluence, and the felt need to demonstrate against another country’s war because this country was not waging one.

However, I believe in full employment, cheap housing, student grants, public ownership, municipal services, and opposition to American wars of liberal intervention. I am by no means averse to the finer things in life. I fully recognise that few are those who could really manage without their bus passes or their Winter Fuel Allowances. I support the principle of universality to the very marrow of my bones.

No, the question is one of balance, plus the perfectly simple writing into the legislation of a ban on jurors and parliamentary candidates who were aged under 18 or even 21, as there is already a ban on jurors aged over 75. Balancing generational interests is as important as balancing class interests, or regional interests, or urban and rural interests, and so on. Only social democracy can do those.

The sheer size of the ageing Baby Boom is such that the democracy in social democracy may require a modest reduction in the voting age. While that case has not yet been made sufficiently convincingly to justify the change, I am less and less decided that it simply never will or could be.

@davidaslindsay

One Nation Labour, by David Lindsay

On the scale of public ownership and on the extent of trade union power, Jeremy Corbyn is well to the right of Harold Macmillan and Alec Douglas-Home. That is not hyperbole. It is fact.

As it is that Margaret Thatcher presided over publicly owned railways, and over a 60p top rate of income tax well above that proposed by Corbyn. And as it is that Tony Blair promised to renationalise the railways in several speeches leading up to the General Election of 1997.

Why would Corbyn’s position not be the centre ground? You can have all the private health insurance that you like. But if you were hit by a car, or if you collapsed in the street with a heart attack, then someone would call 999, and an NHS ambulance would take you to an NHS hospital.

That that call would certainly be made, even by a perfect stranger, is testament to the definition of the United Kingdom’s culture by the social democratic legacy of previous Labour Governments, and supremely of that which was elected in 1945.

Everyone benefits, of all classes and in all areas. Such was always the intention behind it. This is the only British identity that almost anyone alive can remember, or that almost any of the rest would wish to have. Today, however, it is under threat as never before.

Even in the 1980s, nothing came close to the scale of the attack, not merely since the recent General Election, but since that of 2010; under the Liberal Democrats, who never moderated a thing, as much as under the Conservatives.

Labour grew from many and various roots. Trade union and co-operative. Radical Liberal and Tory populist. Christian Socialist and Social Catholic. Fabian and even, in the space both on Labour’s fringes and on Marxism’s fringes, Marxist, subject to the balancing and moderating influences of the others. Giving the wrong answers does not preclude asking the right questions. Much of the Fabian tradition also gives the wrong answers.

Labour has always had a right wing. It always will have. It always should have. People who would prefer the purity of a Stalinist, Trotskyist or Maoist groupuscule have never been short of options. The point is to have a right wing of the Labour Party, and not merely a right wing in the Labour Party. The Leadership of Jeremy Corbyn will achieve that.

From the Trade Union Bill, to public ownership, to the proper centrality of rail and coal, to foreign policy and wars, to Trident, to civil liberties, to the case against the European Union from the very start, Corbyn’s views are the views of Peter Hitchens. Many of them are also shared by Peter Oborne and by several other commentators who could hardly be described as “Loony Left”. 

Furthermore, they are popular. For example, the renationalisation of the railways is consistently supported by between 65 and 70 per cent of the population, stable across all parts of the country and across the electoral bases of all parties. There is strong public support for rent controls, and for a mandatory Living Wage properly so called. Defending the NHS is massively popular.

But even if none of those things were the case, a political party does not exist purely in order to follow public opinion. What would be the point of the Labour Party if it did not campaign for such policies as these?

Labour needs to be a broad alliance between the confidently urban and the confidently rural, between the confidently metropolitan and the confidently provincial, between the confidently secular and the confidently religious, between those confident in their liberal social values and those confident in their conservative social values. It must seek that alliance across all ethnic groups, across all social classes, and across all parts of the country: One Nation.

The basis of that alliance includes the contribution-based Welfare State, with contribution defined to include, for example, caring for children and caring for elderly relatives. It includes workers’ rights, with the trade unionism necessary in order to defend and advance them. It includes John Smith’s signature policy that employment rights must begin on the first day of employment, and apply regardless of the number of hours worked.

That basis includes community organising. It includes profit-sharing and similar arrangements: not “shares for rights”, but shares and rights. It includes the co-operative movement and wider mutualism, not least in the provision of financial services, especially following the loss of the Co-op Bank precisely because it was not itself a co-operative, but was merely owned by one.

That basis includes consumer protection. It includes strong communities. It includes fair taxation. It includes full employment, with low inflation. It includes pragmatic public ownership, including of the utilities, of the postal service and of the railway service, and always with strong parliamentary and municipal accountability. It includes publicly owned industries and services, national and municipal, setting the vocational training standards for the private sector to match.

That basis includes local government, itself including council housing, fiscal autonomy, the provision as well as the commissioning of services, the accountability provided by the historic committee system, and the abolition of delegated planning decisions.

That basis includes the State’s restoration of the economic foundation of the civilised and civilising worker-intellectual culture historically exemplified by the pitmen poets and the pitmen painters, by the brass and silver bands, by the male voice choirs, by the Workers’ Educational Association and the Miners’ Lodge Libraries, by the people’s papers rather than the redtop rags, and so on. In order to restore a civilisation in continuity with it, that culture must be rescued from “the enormous condescension of posterity”.

That basis includes the Union, the Commonwealth (unsentimentally understood), and the ties that bind these Islands, recognising that only social democracy guarantees the Union and that only the Union makes possible social democracy in these Islands, so that the erosion of social democracy is the most powerful of separatist arguments, despite the fact that the separatists could not possibly deliver social democracy, and very largely would not wish to deliver it, in the entities to which they aspired.

That basis includes economic patriotism, itself including both energy independence and balanced migration. It includes the recognition that we cannot deliver the welfare provisions and the other public services that our people have rightly come to expect unless we know how many people there are in this country, unless we control immigration properly, and unless we insist that everyone use spoken and written English to the necessary level.

That basis includes an approach to climate change which protects and extends secure employment with civilised wages and working conditions, which encourages economic development around the world, which upholds the right of the working classes and of non-white people to have children, which holds down and as far as practicable reduces the fuel prices that always hit the poor hardest, and which refuses to restrict either travel opportunities or a full diet to the rich.

That basis includes the full compatibility between, on the one hand, the highest view of human demographic, economic, intellectual and cultural expansion and development, and, on the other hand, the most active concern for the conservation of the natural world and of the treasures bequeathed by such expansion and development in the past.

That basis includes the organic Constitution, with the full pageantry and ceremony of the parliamentary and municipal processes, and itself including a very British trait of inbuilt self-criticism: variously Radical and republican, populist and pacifist, Celtic and regional, proletarian and intellectual (often both at once), exemplified in the present age by the distinct role of Dennis Skinner at the State Opening of Parliament, a role as much a part of the event as that of the Queen, with each of them as the latest, but far from the last, in a long, long line. It includes the lesson that the public ownership, the local government, and the trade union rights that existed in 1979 were by then integral parts of the organic Constitution, such that the assault on them set the precedent and the pattern for further assaults on other such parts.

That basis includes the national and parliamentary sovereignty of the United Kingdom in the face of all challenges: from the United States or from the European Union, from Israel or from the Gulf monarchies, from the Russian oligarchs or from the rising powers of Asia, from money markets or from media moguls, from separatists or from communalists, from over-mighty civil servants and diplomats (including in the intelligence services) or from over-mighty municipal officers, and from inappropriately imported features of the economic and political cultures of the Old Dominions. This list is not exhaustive.

That basis includes co-operation between the United Kingdom and the United States on the basis of civil liberty, which includes and necessitates national sovereignty, which compels international realism, which tends towards peace, which safeguards civil liberty.

That basis includes the understanding that the national and parliamentary sovereignty of the United Kingdom is, with municipalism, the only means to social democracy in the territory that it covers, and is thus the democracy in social democracy. It includes, no less than the previous point, the understanding that only social democracy, and not least the public ownership of the commanding heights of the economy, is capable of safeguarding that sovereignty, national and parliamentary, and that democracy, parliamentary and municipal.

That basis includes conservation and the countryside, especially the political representation of the rural working class. It includes personal freedom through superb and inexpensive public transport, ultimately free at the point of use. It includes academic excellence, with technical proficiency, refusing to compromise on either, and according to apprentices and trainees the same benefits as are accorded to their peers in further and higher education, as well as vice versa.

That basis includes civil liberties, with law and order, including visible and effective policing, and including an end to light sentences and to lax prison discipline through a return to a free country’s minimum requirements for conviction.

That basis includes fiscal responsibility, of which neoliberal capitalism is manifestly and demonstrably the opposite. It includes a strong financial services sector, with a strong food production and manufacturing base, and with the strong democratic accountability of both.

That basis includes a total rejection of class war, insisting instead on “a platform broad enough for all to stand upon”. It includes, nevertheless, the understanding that justice is prior to peace, and that justice always necessitates some kind of struggle against injustice, which can take the form of a war under certain very exceptional circumstances, so that Her Majesty’s Justices maintain the Queen’s Peace precisely because there is, and there can be, “No Justice, No Peace”.

That basis includes a large and thriving private sector, a large and thriving middle class, and a large and thriving working class; all depend on central and local government action, and with public money come public responsibilities.

That basis includes very high levels of productivity, with the robust protection of workers, consumers, communities and the environment, including powerful workers’ representation at every level of corporate governance. It includes a base of real property for every household, to resist both over-mighty commercial interests and an over-mighty State. It includes an absolute statutory division between investment banking and retail banking.

That basis includes a realist foreign policy, itself including strong national defence, and precluding any new Cold War against Russia, China, Iran or anywhere else. It includes British military intervention only ever in order to defend British territory or British interests. It includes a leading role on the world stage, with a vital commitment to peace, and with a complete absence of weapons of mass destruction. It includes the diversion of the cost of the renewal of Trident to conventional defence and to the real nuclear deterrent, which is civil nuclear power within an “all of the above” energy policy organised around that nuclear power and around the exploitation of this country’s vast reserves of coal.

And that basis includes the subjection both of Islamism and of neoconservatism to an approach defined by our proud history of equal opposition to Stalinism, Maoism, Trotskyism, Nazism, Fascism, and the Far Right regimes in Southern Africa, Latin America and elsewhere.

@davidaslindsay

Increase The Budget, But Slay The Cow?, by Paul Bicknell

An argument in favour of bona-fide public works schemes.

Honest conceptual clarification of the NHS, which few wish to hear on either side of the chamber, will help the public decide on what may be a crisis, but not necessarily one of patient care. Meanwhile, liberated funds could be used to fight child-poverty.

There is a false dichotomy concerning the National Health Service.

Under the aegis of the left, we are led to believe, it is a neo-Keynesian employment racket which telegenic Tory rascal Dan Hannan will tell any voter in earshot (he tells it glibly and inaccurately) employs three times as many managers as medical staff and is the worlds’ third largest employer after the Chinese Red Army and Indian National Railways.

Meanwhile, under the imagined corruption of the right, so the story goes, millions, albeit not billions are wasted on cronyism; the money which is ‘haemorrhaged’ on external consultants either directly, but also indirectly; there are thousands for example of what one candid recruitment consultant said to me recently of private sector recruiters for the NHS regularly taking home six figure salaries (you know, four times that of a junior doctor etc).

There are very laudable, honourable and genuine reasons for those of us on the left to laudably proclaim the virtues of a cradle to the grave, free at point of access (and various other pieces of dogma) public health programme.

What can be more touching a use of income, what could be more apple pie and mother than the public’s health? This hasn’t been a partisan issue, even in the dark days of Thatcherism (who would nevertheless never speak about using the NHS on the record).

John Major, a more benign Tory in his party conference speech in 1991, famously pledged: ‘No privatisation of healthcare, neither piecemeal, nor in part, nor in whole, not today, not tomorrow, not after the next election, not ever while I am prime minister.’

Now what’s the schtick? 

He was required to say this against the ‘better’ instincts of the right hand side of the chamber, because under Neil Kinnock, sensible centrist policy was under threat of stealing the lower middle-class vote and he could not afford to lose the voting block which the NHS represents?

It is a fine example of how the praxis (the mid-point of the dialectic between left and right) has worked in British politics since the people’s budget of Lloyd George and the introduction on these islands of superannuation.

There is a centrist path-dependent dynamism, which sadly exists in the absence of revolution. To put this simply, the would-be revolutionary zeal, the once real possibility of full-structural Marxism, has had the rug pulled out from under it by revolutionary social policy instead.

The radical left-has thus won a great many battles, but sadly few if any in government. Those of us, who in the absence of revolution, wish government to be more left wing, must do so almost playfully with a kind of magnetic inertia which operates around the praxis. Then we can win elections. 

The crisis of NHS funding is one at its heart then which is not about patient care per se, but is about what the NHS is largely in practice once you subtract its MacGuffin, one of the largest scale public works schemes in the western world.

It’s the beastly Hannan postulate again, but I wish to eat the cake and have it. I wish to bite the bullet.

While 98.8% of NHS funding comes from general taxation and National Insurance, with just 1.2% coming from patient charges, amounting to 9.3% of GDP, according to the Kings Fund, under the French system big business pays for peoples’ healthcare, with the tiny percentile coming from general taxation.

Let’s keep the health service for what it was originally intended for, firstly. Secondly, with the liberated funds, let’s create an honest-to-goodness quangocracy which deals with ‘public works’, which would exist at regional levels only (more of which at the end).

There is a unique opportunity for the Corbyn faction of the Labour Party to do this.

It could be a better idea than nationalising the railways and in any case it would be underpinned by sound neo-Keynesian economics and economists such as David Blanchflower as well as the conservative International Monetary Fund.

What would the public works scheme be for the Blairite monkey on my right shoulder is asking me?

Well this misses the point, given the fact that currently the public works scheme is already in existence; it forms a large part of the NHS, and its existence is there merely to propagate itself with ‘wastage’.

The wastage is the creation of millions of upper middle-class non-jobs. University educated ninnies who believe the tradesman of Wychwood Avenue owe him or her a living.

And then call it ‘Left’, or ‘Conservative’ or ‘the common ground’; because one thing is true, on the NHS nothing really substantive seems to change.

In any case, with the issue such as the relative poverty of children at the absolute forefront of our minds, with homelessness at very high levels and with the myriad of worthy causes proclaimed by many of the charities, it should not be beyond the wit of human kind to concoct a package of schemes which could put these very bright and able graduates to better use.

Let’s break the tired narrative of NHS funding, the bloated entity which has grown since inception. It still existed pervasively under New Labour and continues to this day.

Simon Stevens, the chief executive of NHS England appointed last year by the Tories, despite being policy advisor to two separate Labour secretaries of state for health Frank Dobson and Alan Milburn, may be one of the more shrewd moves made by David Cameron since in government.

But he is not committed to coming clean with the public: Telling them honestly what the NHS has come to be about. There are other more minor ideological issues as well.

Over 300m consultations in England and Wales take place each year and more than one billion prescriptions dispensed (albeit three-quarters are free because they go to the elderly and the unemployed), according to the Health and Social Care Information Centre.

So keen are we on the left to hold-truck with dogma and so keen are they on the right to use weasel-words and policy which chimes with the public sector electorate, we refuse to acknowledge the usefulness of a small £5 consultation charge for higher-rate taxpayers which in turn would liberate funds to reduce treatment costs currently paid by the sick and needy poor.

It could be a simple trade-off. Wealthy drunks presenting on Friday and Saturday nights with frivolous and vexatious complaints pay in the stead of a young person needing for the sake of argument, expensive anti-retroviral drugs.

NHS finance announced last week what is needed to keep the unfit for purpose entity running: A £3.8bn increase to the NHS budget next year to cover £2bn on new drugs, 800,000 new operations, 5.5m more outpatient appointments and 2m more diagnostic tests.

Now behind the spin of course we can see while this money is indeed equivalent to these costs, one might just as well argue that the money is being used to fund NHS administration as much as anything else.

Heidi Alexander MP, Labour’s Shadow Health Secretary, barks up the wrong tree slightly then in riposte: “With hospitals facing a £2.2 billion deficit this year, and demand going up, this money will simply be plugging the black hole that has emerged in NHS finances under the Tories.”

This is true and while it is also undoubtedly true that patient care must not be compromised at any cost; it does not follow that cuts will necessarily cause detriment to patient care.

Meaning the statement by Alexander: “While ministers also remain committed to making £22 billion worth of efficiency savings in the NHS by 2020” is spot on. “Everyone in the NHS knows that efficiencies on this scale simply cannot be delivered without harming patient care,” may not be. 

Administrators of the odious new poor law of 1834, in replacing the more generous and fair system of local mandates which existed under the 43rd of Elizabeth, would become well aware of how much more costly it must be to run a centralised and bureaucratic system.

Let’s break the cycle of ‘unintended consequences’ and public dishonesty.

The Tories coalition government was rightly lambasted (though not nearly vocally enough) for removing pivotal components of regional governance, whilst doing little to dismember the centralised cronies; the apparatchiks closer to the heart of government.

We desperately need public works schemes: socially and economically. Let’s have them and be honest about it.

We also desperately need to eliminate wastage in the NHS: Let’s do it; there would be no unemployment consequences provided it could be done in a mature ‘piecemeal’ fashion.

@TallBiggles

The Founder Members of the Lanchester Forum

We are the Founder Members of the Lanchester Forum, which has been set up in order to offer supportive criticism and critical support of the Leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, and of the Deputy Leadership of Tom Watson. A multiauthor website will be set up in the near future. Beginning in 2016, at least three events will be held per year, one at Durham, one at the Labour Party Conference, and one at the Palace of Westminster. 

David Lindsay (Convenor), Lanchester, County Durham; @davidaslindsay
Roger Godsiff MP, Member of Parliament for Birmingham Hall Green; @RogerGodsiff

Professor Bryan Gould, Member of Parliament for Southampton Test, 1974-1979; Member of Parliament for Dagenham, 1983-1994; Shadow Cabinet Member, 1986-1994; Labour Leadership Candidate, 1992
David Drew, Member of Parliament for Stroud, 1997-2010; @DavidEDrew 

Kerry Pollard, Member of Parliament for St Albans, 1997-2005; @KerryPollard_ 

Tom Bailey, London; @TomBaileyBlog 

Paul Bicknell, West Midlands; @TallBiggles 

Dr Luke Blaxill, Research Fellow, Hertford College, Oxford
Ronan Dodds, Jesmond, Newcastle upon Tyne

James Doran, Darlington; @doran_j 

Daniel Downes, Buckinghamshire; @DanDownes 

James Draper, Lanchester, County Durham 

Paul Embery, Regional Secretary, Fire Brigades Union (London); @PaulEmbery 

Tom Fowdy, Sunderland; St Aidan’s College, Durham; Hong Kong University; @Koryo1992 

Councillor Mark Fryer, Workington; @MarkFryer61 

Dr Chris Horner, London; @spitfirepilot1 

Hani Latif, Hertford; Trevelyan College, Durham; @kinghani 

Paul Leake, Durham; Unison; @paulleake 

John Mooney, Lurgan, County Armagh; @FitzjamesHorse 

Joe Plumb, Pity Me, County Durham; Iquitos, Peru 

Dr Martin Prior, http://martinse.livejournal.com/ 

John Paul Reid, London; @JohnPReid 

James Rogerson, Victoria, Australia; @jfgrogerson 

Daniel Singleton, London; @DSingleton_ 

Andy Walton, Bow; @waltonandy

18th November 2015.