Richard Nixon famously told a press conference that he was ‘not a crook’. And in the sense that the late US president was never found guilty of anything whatsoever, the statement is factually incontestable.
Likewise, Tony Blair is not a war criminal, even though contention to the contrary is a longstanding commonplace among anti-war campaigners, repeated endlessly on social media to this day. Continue reading
Back in 2002, New Labour accepted a £100,000 donation from Daily Express proprietor Richard Desmond, a man who made his original fortune from printing pornographic publications under such lurid titles as The Very Best of Mega Boobs and – hey, let’s not be squeamish, because Blair certainly wasn’t – Spunk Loving Sluts. Questioned on the issue, cabinet minister John Reid retorted:
If you asking if we are going to sit in moral judgment and have a political judgment on those who contribute to the Labour Party, the answer is no.”
And there you have it. Business bungs to Labour were at that time officially a morality-free zone, in which even political calculations played no part. One wonders what the current crop of feminist Labour MPs – the ones that routinely indict Corbyn for alleged low-level non-violent misogyny, even as they threaten to knife him in the front – would have made of that one? Continue reading
The news that London Labour activists are working their butts off to secure a victory for Labour’s candidate in the London mayoral elections, on the grounds that Labour electoral success is good news for the leader of the Labour Party, is hardly the stuff of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalism.
Yet such is the substance of a recent front page splash in the London Standard, published online under the somewhat lurid headline of ‘Revealed: Hard-Left plot to back Sadiq Khan in bid to strengthen Corbyn’.
In what is breathlessly described as ‘a setback to the Tooting MP’ that ‘damage[s] Sadiq’, the Standard ‘can reveal that leaders of the controversial Momentum group told activists to support the Labour candidate’. How very dare they! I’ll have words with that Lansman fella next time I bump into him, you see if I don’t. Continue reading
Peter Mandelson famously declared himself “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich, as long as they pay their taxes”. His successors now appear intensely relaxed about the wealthy not paying their taxes at all. Senior Blairite John McTernan has responded to last weekend’s Panama Papers revelations by reassuring Telegraph readers that “tax avoidance is an expression of basic British freedoms.”
It also appears to be an expression of the basic Russian oligarch freedom to transfer huge kickbacks out of their country, and the inalienable right of dodgy Middle East politicians to set up shell companies in jurisdictions with banking regulations so light touch that they would make Gordon Brown blush, but let that pass. Continue reading
There is currently no small vogue among polemicists of right-wing bent to accuse lefties of something they call ‘virtue signalling‘. So please allow me to introduce a parallel neologism.
Many of the ugly responses from free market ideologues to the crisis now destroying the British steel industry are clear-cut examples of nasty signalling, designed to underline a given writer’s robustly Hayekian lack of sentimentality in economic matters. An exemplar here is surely Allister Heath’s recent Telegraph article, insisting that Port Talbot should be allowed to go to the wall.
‘It may be heartbreaking’, the publication’s deputy editor insists, as he plays Hearts and Flowers on the world’s smallest violin. But there must be no bail out for Welsh steelworkers, you see. ‘Government intervention tends to fail,’ we are told. ‘Throwing taxpayers’ cash at unviable, obsolete firms to postpone their demise ends up destroying far more jobs that it saves.’ Continue reading
