Identity Politics, Indeed

Christine Shawcroft had clearly had a bad meeting or something, but she was saying what a lot of people on the middle-class Left thought. Their own unions are often not affiliated to the Labour Party, and never have been. If they are in affiliated unions, then they do not get to run them automatically, if at all. Whereas we middle-class types are, of course, used to running everything as a matter of course. 

15 years ago, possibly this month, I remember Neil Fleming screaming at me about Iraq and how the unions were, "interfering in matters that do not concern them." As if he or I, and I was no middle-aged cripple then, might have been called upon to fight. The unions were speaking for their members, for those members' families, and for those families' communities. By the end he, who ran the Labour Chief's Whip's constituency office at the time, was chanting like a man possessed, "Cut The Link! Cut The Link!"

I found out very soon afterwards that he and Hilary was also conspiring to ensure that there was no selection conference in Lanchester to fill the vacancy created by the retirement of one of the District Councillors. Chairing the Branch, and having done so for several years, I found out that Neil was the nominee when I was presented with the nomination papers to sign in the pub.

Thankfully, he lost. But that was the first occasion on which the right-wing Labour machine, to which Neil had attached himself opportunistically, kept me out of a council seat by cheating. The second was last year, when it went to rather more drastic lengths, a splendid concession that it could never have beaten me in a fair fight. Hilary and Neil also once spitefully denied me my home CLP's nomination for the National Executive Committee, thereby keeping me off the ballot. Again, you would only do that if you knew that your enemy would otherwise have won.

Still, even I have come to miss Neil Fleming. Look at what has replaced him. At least in those days there was any purpose to a Constituency Labour Party in North West Durham. Does such a body still exist? If so, then why? The national party regarded no one here as capable of being a parliamentary candidate, or even of having a say in the process of selecting one.

If you do not take that view of the people of North West Durham, or if you can cope with a middle-class politician who most certainly does value the political role of the trade unions, of if you can do without any hint of the advice of Munroe Bergdorf, or if you would like to support a parliamentary candidate who unconditionally rejected gender self-identification in favour of biological reality and the safety of women, then you know what you have to do, brothers and sisters. You know what you have to do.