Tuesday 6 June 2006

My name is David Lindsay, and...

My name is David Lindsay, and I want to be a Labour MP. I joined the Labour Party when I was 17, have served on CLP GC and EC (and on DLP) since I was 18, chaired my Branch for several years from the age of 19, became a Parish Councillor (in an unusually large and busy Parish) at the legal minimum age of 21, became a primary school governor just short of my twenty-second birthday, and became a comprehensive school governor just short of my twenty-third birthday. I have since been re-elected as a Parish Councillor and re-appointed to both of my school governorships, having served as Vice-Chair of the primary Governing Body. At 19, I was a Ward Sub-Agent in the 1997 General Election, securing an overall majority of the total vote on a four-way split in a traditionally Tory ward. And at 25, I became DLP Secretary, having been a District Group Observer for three years before that. I have only just relinquished that office, aged 28.
Therefore, I should now appreciate the opportunity to make a further contribution, drawing and building upon those experiences, which include a great deal of committee work, of working to deadlines, and of hugely successful co-operation with a very wide range of individuals and bodies. Furthermore, I have always done all of the above while engaged in either or both of full-time paid work and various forms of academic work, as well as numerous other voluntary activities, thus demonstrating, I feel, both my commitment, and my ability to organise my time to optimal effect.
I am a One Nation politician, with an equal emphasis on the One and on the Nation. Therefore, I am a Socialist: I believe in the universal Welfare State and in the strong statutory (including trade union) protection of workers, consumers, communities and the environment, the former paid for by progressive taxation, the whole underwritten by full employment, and all these good things delivered by the partnership between a strong Parliament and strong local government.
I offer the possibility of many years of service in the future. My mixed ethnic background would also add an unusual, but increasingly important, dimension. I reject all talk of left and right within the Party, or of Old Labour and New Labour: I am simply Labour and proud of it.I wish to be a workers’ MP on a worker’s wage, accepting only the national average salary for full-time work (the real rate for the job), and donating the rest to political and community causes, and thus rising with the British People rather than above the British People. I should campaign for election on what I firmly believe to be this hugely popular basis.
Meanwhile, I hope that you will enjoy the posts below, which are on politics, philosophy, theology, history, literature and other things.
My email address is davidaslindsay@hotmail.com

3 comments:

  1. As I say to anyone who questions my parliamentary ambitions, unless you undertake to put up against me wherever I might stand, and unless you match my commitment to be A Workers' MP On A Worker's Wage, then you have already lost the argument. So, will you give that double undertaking, under your real name? If not, then shut up and go away.

    As to what that real name might be, I have five suspects, having ruled out any of my old enemies in the Durham Union Society, since these are notable, not only for the paucity of their numbers (if they're reading this, you didn't dare put it to Gen Comm or a General Meeting, did you? Why do those bodies still exist?), but also for the fact that they would not be capable of writing anything like this. So, whom does that leave?

    Suspect One would have a nerve attacking me (or anyone else) over academic publication records, since he is actually employed at (preferentially generous) public expense to produce such publications, yet has never published a book, and, in more than ten years to date, has published precisely two items: a short article in a journal published out of the institution that he nominally heads, and distributed only by being sent free of charge to that institution's benefactors; and a paper delivered to a conference held in that institution.

    The whole world could not contain the books that would have to be written in order to detail all the wickedness and incompetence of this person, both halfs of whose much-vaunted double doctorate were awarded in the same year by "different" institutions in the same city, and no two lists of whose "academic" "qualifications" are ever the same. Yes, the whole, world could not contain them. But cyberspace might be able to...

    In any case, with which of my views does he disagree? Raising the age of consent to 18? Or what, exactly? And why?

    Of Suspect Two, I take back every word and apologise unreservedly if he is innocent. Unlike the other four, he is not necessarily the person described here, but only if he is guilty in this regard.

    But in that case, he is a tragic figure. Like Suspect One, his PhD has never been published, more than a decade after being awarded. Hang around for long enough as a postgrad and one becomes an embarrassment to the institution, which will then award one's higher degree merely to take one off the books: been there, done that.

    As, indeed, has Suspect Two. But, alas, he persists in the delusion that he is a proper academic, merely beacuse he happens to be amrried to one. Therefore, he has never done a day's work in his life, beacuse it would be beneath him; and he swans around university towns, living, Blair-like, on pocket money from the wife, and wondering, with great and increasing bitterness, why no one seems to recognise his genius.

    Suspect Three, like all the others, has nothing if not time on her hands, having been sacked for failing miserably to carry out the duties of a publicly well-remunerated job (let the employers of Suspect One take note).

    With the BNP's having promised to contest her inherited seat against me but not against anyone else (including her, of whom they obviously approve), with a faction of the Ku Klux Klan's having emailed Tony Blair all the way from America (and copied to all manner of media) requesting him to back her against me, and with most of her constituents now in wards never represented by her father, I am not exactly at the top of her Christmas card list. Whereas she is at the very top of my retirement card list.

    Suspect Four ahd thought that he was on course to take over this seat, his employment by Subject Three having already secured him all manner of positions for which he simply would not otherwise have been considered. Ah, the best-laid plans...

    But he would know that there is no such establishment as "Lanchester Working-Men's Club", nor is the form in the middle of this title correct anyway.

    And Suspect Five, a real outside bet, was an Independent Councillor in a neighbouring ward during my time as Secretary of the District Labour Party. Unlike his paleocon brethren among the Independents, this "real English eccentric" took against me in the most ferocious fashion, although he has since expressed publicly the very views that so vexed him when I first articulated them.

    The capability question arises in the first, third, fourth and fifth case, unanswerably so in at least the final three: they might wish that they could attack me in such terms (insofar as they undersatnd them), but it would be quite beyond them to do so.

    But the main point remains the first one: will you undertake to put up against me wherever I might stand, and to match my commitment to be A Workers' MP On A Worker's Wage, under your real name? If not, then you have already lost the argument, so shut up and go away.

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  2. If my predecessor at the comp was so wonderful, then why was she replaced with a 22-year-old in the first place?

    Both LC and davidarselindsay make disparaging remarks about the early ages at which I attained various offices and so forth. Well, that says a lot more about them than it does about me. Have they ever attained such things, even at their presumably much more advanaced ages? I thought not.

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