An affront to parliamentary democracy that produces Truss as PM and Corbyn as Labour leader

Both main UK political parties have for more than a decade betrayed parliamentary democracy in favour of a US primary-type method for electing a party leader. On Monday we witnessed some of the awful consequences of that in the live televised head to head Truss-Sunak ‘debate’. The style, and no doubt agreed structure, of the prime time BBC1 broadcast was a grotesque dumbed down pandering to broadcast media conceptions of what the public will stomach. Given that it was the Parliamentary Conservative Party that reduced the candidates to two, and that 160,000 party members who, for the cheap price of an annual membership fee, will determine who the PM is, then any preconceived notion of what the British public wants is irrelevant. Another consequence of this Tory leadership election method, just as is normal now during a General Election of course, is the rival camps’ petty abuse on social media. I note that the media broadcast the five candidates’ debate before it shifted to a two horse race among Tory party members. However the choice of whether to broadcast these debates was that of the Tory party. They could have kept the election of their parliamentary leader where it properly belongs: in Parliament.

This Tory members’ party leadership election is worse than a US-style party primary because this is the third election in a row among Conservative Party members that has selected the PM by selecting their party leader. I accept that we live in a parliamentary democracy and that therefore the choice of PM is not the people’s direct choice. And I accept that the resultant new PM is not obligated to call an instant general election because, yes, their, authority comes from that elected Parliament. It is precisely my belief in parliamentary democracy, despite residual royal authority exercised by an executive only partly checked by an elected parliament, that means that I think that a parliamentary party should determine who its leader is, not that party’s membership. The fact that the media has influence on any such membership election of any major political party is largely the fault of the two parties for agreeing this method of choosing the leader. And for agreeing to televise the debates. 

Surely an election method that brought us Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the opposition and which runs the serious risk of imposing Liz Truss on us as PM, is very flawed indeed. I stand by bad electoral outcomes if that is either the popular will or the will of popularly elected MPs. I wholly object to bad, or any, outcome decided by a narrow band of Tory or Labour Party members, especially when this narrow band in either party can get to determine, directly, who the Prime Minister of the UK is. 

I would like to think that the two main UK party leaderships could agree together to go back to the future and resume parliamentary democracy when it comes to choosing their party leader. However this would be akin to reinventing Labour’s civil war of the 1980s, and for the Tories it would upset a membership base that seems to like the power to ensure that ‘chief betrayer’ Sunak can be prevented from entering No10 in favour of someone whose economic grasp revolves around printing money and whose regional knowledge when visiting an enemy capital suggested she wasn’t fit to teach GCSE Geography let alone lead the primary European military power.

Labour's class coalition coming unstuck over Europe

Labour’s pragmatism (or waffle/procrastination) over Brexit, argues writer Nick Cohen, is both psephologically illiterate and ideologically motivated. Of course trying to bridge different interests has a very long tradition in the party. A compromise among Labour’s class and ideological broad church brought majority Labour governments for at least some of the period from 1945-2010. On Europe, Labour has never been enthusiastic, preferring to try on this, as on many other major issues, to manage (or obfuscate) the deep divisions within its electoral and parliamentary coalition.

Gaitskell feigned ‘little Englander’ anger at a prospective ‘end of a thousand years of history,’ while Wilson only tentatively sought to get beyond De Gaulle’s ‘Non’ in response to Macmillan's speculative application. It was Tory PM Heath who forced through the UK’s membership of the then Common Market (with the backing of some dissident Labour MPs) in an exercise in executive chutzpah. Three years later Wilson foreshadowed Cameron by putting political convenience before national interest and held the UK’s first referendum on whether to leave the European project. In the 1950s and early 1960s Jim Callaghan had reflected the Labourite conservatism of the Party’s trade union base in being instinctively unenthusiastic about the Common Market. However, as foreign secretary and then Prime Minister in the 1970s, Callaghan understood that as a middle-ranking post-imperial power, the UK was either in the club or it was irrelevant. 

Labour leader Michael Foot had to swallow many of the ideological stances of a hard left that - as a parliamentary socialist, intellect and pragmatist - he usually had little time for. However Foot tried his best to manage the then intra-party coalition that was rupturing over Europe – and over much else. Kinnock and Smith took Labour back to its broad church position on Europe, defence, and the economy. Blair in turn maintained that traditional Labour pragmatism on Europe. However the desperation of party that, in Austin Mitchell’s famous words, was ‘prepared to eat shit to get a Labour government,’ meant that Blair and Brown could get away with upholding the neo-liberal abdication of national interest they inherited from Margaret Thatcher, even if much of the country baulked at their unprecedentedly supine and ill-considered Iraq policy. Blair was arguably an outlier in Labour’s tradition, although on much social and welfare policy, and on Europe, he was pragmatic. 

Corbyn though is the first ever Labour leader who's not a genuine managerial pragmatist. He’s also the first Labour leader since George Lansbury to have little interest in leading. Corbyn is rooted in the late 1970s and early 1980s hard left Labour ‘activist’ myopia that favoured ideological correctness over class compromise. Back in the day, a half-baked perversion of cod Marxist theory led the polytechnocrats and bourgeois militants of the Bennite left to believe that, from the ashes of the dialectical clash of the differing class interests that have characterised the Party from birth to government, a truly socialist (ruling) class could emerge to finally deliver socialism.

The spectacle of a Labour Party, a Labour Party, run by middle class activists purporting, Leninist-style, to lead the proletariat into the light, didn’t convince many of the working class, then or now. Nor did it attract many of the middle class: the support of sufficient white-collar workers has always been a necessary and important part of Labour’s coalition. 

Today, the ideological heirs of Labour’s early 1980s deviation into political irrelevance are prioritising their own version of the party’s historic pragmatic alliance. In their case however it’s a very unholy union of bourgeois leftist disdain for a ‘capitalist club’ (the EU) with the appeasement of Labour’s disappearing white working class voting base who are angry over immigration and the loss of national sovereignty.  

Labour might now decide that the middle class electoral swing to the pro-EU Lib-Dem centre (and the Green left) is so out-stripping the loss of (white) working class Labour voters to the Brexit Party, that it can no longer maintain the party’s historic fudge on Europe. However a firm Labour embrace of another referendum – because Tories aren’t going to vote for an early electoral Christmas, to paraphrase aspirant Labour Party leader McDonnell – could mean JC jettisoning his misguided version of Labour class pragmatism in favour of a stance that hardly convinces anybody.

Corbyn cannot seek to persuade 'decent moderate Tories' (to paraphrase Baroness Chakrabarti on the ‘Marr’ show) to back another national referendum if he doesn’t make clear how he wants actual or prospective Labour voters to vote. Likewise, he cannot present himself as the nation’s prospective PM in the event of a short-notice general election if he can’t say whether he wants Britain to be in or out of the EU. So, unless Corbyn intends to approach the next fork in the road with the response he’s maintained ever since the last EU referendum, he will be forced to break the Party’s historic class coalition and to prioritise the winning back of liberal middle class voters. However unless they are convinced by Corbyn's 11th hour decisiveness, then Labour might have kissed goodbye to the white working class and to the prospect of ever returning to power.

Labour's forgotten the 100th anniversary of working class men getting the vote

The Labour Party has forgotten that it's also the 100th anniversary of working class men getting the vote, all of them. In 2018 Labour is saying that the fight for women's equality still goes on, but has a problem saying that the fight for class equality must continue too. 

Yet ironically today's Labour Party, under a pro-Brexit, left-wing leadership, has no problem getting liberal middle class support. It's the (white) working class (who are often pro-Brexit) that Labour is still struggling to reconnect with. Without them Labour won't win the next General Election. 

Unless Labour can somehow rediscover its class credentials throughout Britain without alienating the metropolitan middle class, the Tories will win again. This requires being progressive on tax and social justice, tough on getting British workers into employment and reducing immigration, and asserting a UK identity that’s inclusive in terms of class as well as gender, sexuality and ethnicity. 

Building a broad class base is good democratic politics. For most of its history Labour has understood that this, rather than narrow sectarian interests, are what brings it power. It can’t, and shouldn’t be expected to, propose class war. However Labour didn’t lose elections because it talked about and tackled class inequality. 

Addressing this subject now could bring back some of the badly needed white working class voters who didn’t back Labour at the 2017 General Election, despite Jeremy Corbyn having long been a Brexiteer.

Labour leadership ballot: A victory for common sense

I have just mailed my Labour Leadership ballot. It was a tough decision to bring myself to vote for “none of the two sad saps whose old hard left and neo-right wing cabals, respectively, have done so much damage to the Party since the 2015 leadership election”. But it had to be done. It is only sad that a spoilt virtual ballot isn’t possible too, given that the greater majority of members have and will vote online.

I don’t like being an abstainer, but Militant-reborn (Momentum) versus Mr Smith’s cynical little “retail offer” of left-sounding bargains for the undiscerning shopper in the Labour leader market place is absolutely no choice at all. The UK isn’t a presidential system. The morons at Labour HQ who invited me to vote for “Labour’s candidate to be the next Prime Minister” should consider improving their knowledge of our hard-won democratic political system rather than taking courses in law, computer studies or perpetual revolution. Our last wholly inadequate Labour leader didn’t understand our political system either, and bequeathed us Labour (would-be) prime minister primaries. Consequently, votes to determine Labour’s parliamentary leader have been bought by a ragtag bunch of leftist discontents who’ve rarely sullied their hands with campaign material in a general or local election, let alone knocked on doors outside of red rosette donkey territory and tried to persuade a member of the working class of the joys of socialism and unrestricted immigration.

Four of the only six Labour prime ministers in British history - MacDonald, Attlee, Wilson and Callaghan - were elected by the votes of Labour MPs only. The other two were for the most part supported by the Parliamentary Party but either defined themselves against Labour (Blair) or were wholly incapable of talking to the country (Brown).


Once Jeremy has taken us to our worst general election defeat since 1918 and, please God, resigns, can we take the parliamentary leadership vote away from party members, registered supporters and affiliated members, and place it where it belongs? I mean with those who are Labour parliamentary representatives, and who know what it’s like to talk to voters and do not see parliament as merely a platform for mobilising the masses toward some imagined socialist nirvana. Then perhaps plausible Labour parliamentary leaders (and thus plausible British prime ministers) can throw their hat into the ring, such as Hilary Benn and …eh…..eh…Yvette Cooper…eh…

Careful what you wish for: Brexit will feed popular anger, UK breakup and Labour irrelevance

This morning’s news confirmed the dread I felt going to bed last light. The Brexiteers have won. Just as disturbing are the domestic party political consequences. People who campaigned for the UK to Remain in the EU feared a Leave vote would parachute a more right wing Tory into No 10, in addition to unravelling employment protection legislation for British workers, and reducing living standards for all. 

Two of these three elements are already happening, although Boris and Gove may have to wait until October to see which of them claims the prize. A run on the pound, if sustained, will not only push up prices but put off badly needed foreign investors whose wealth we need to finance the growing deficit in trade and services. When it is freed from the “shackles” of the EU, an even more rightward Conservative Government will also be free to reduce British workers’ rights at work.

The new UK leadership will be under enormous pressure to confirm that a Leave vote will produce a major change in the one issue that sadly dominated the campaign: European immigration. Goodwill among remaining EU member states will be necessary for the UK to retain access to the European Single Market. It will be very hard to generate, whatever the claimed influence of domestic car makers over German chancellor, Angela Merkel. Why make secession from the EU seem relatively painless when you are desperately trying to keep the union together amidst bail outs and migration crises and the possibility of other member states, or at least their emboldened far right parties, seeking a similar vote? If the UK is not allowed to stay in the European Single Market then the common standards that the EU enforces – the right to holidays, and maternity and paternity pay, even for temporary workers – can be swept away by the new Tory administration.

Perhaps a change at the top of British politics in the context of UK negotiations with the EU over the terms of its exit will create a public clamour among a newly empowered British electorate for a UK General Election in the Autumn. After all, can the angry British public continue to say “What’s the point in voting, they’re all the same?” However, even a divided Tory Party would trash a Labour Party that firmly, and conservatively, sided with the status quo – remaining in the EU – especially one that may still be led by Jeremy Corbyn. The man who told white working class Labour voters angry about deindustrialisation and public spending cuts that unlimited migration was a good thing sounded even more out of touch with Labour’s traditional values than the Blair acolytes he so roundly trounced in last year’s leadership election.

The last time the Labour Party faced a working class revolt over immigration it used the pragmatism of office to swiftly reduce it, specifically targeting Commonwealth immigration in hurried legislation issued in the wake of the mass appeal nationalism of Enoch Powell. Blair in government was disinterested in the contemporary version of these concerns, which is less about colour but is partly about culture and religion. Being a believer in neo-liberal economics he didn’t consider using the option of a five year delay to mass Polish immigration.

Middle class metropolitan liberals like to shop around in the multicultural store. Britain for them is about values, imperfect and contradictory as they may be, not culture or identity. Mr Brown famously said of a voter who was the epitome of traditional Labour support that she was “some bigoted old woman.” The EU referendum debate did not mention culture, the “c” word that still doesn’t get mentioned in polite political company, yet it was there all the time, just below the surface, and Remain had nothing to say about it. In fact the Remain campaign’s leading figures had precious little to say about immigration at all, other than it was simply a “good thing”, until the final stages when a few relatively centrist Labour figures mused unconvincingly about trying to restrict it from the rest of Europe.

We do need migrants, skilled and unskilled, but we also need to properly train our own workforce, enforce a genuine Living wage, clamp down on illegal migrants, and punish hard those who sidestep our workers in favour of cheaper workers, wherever they come from. (The UK would actually have had the EU on its side if it got tough with UK-based companies who import cheaper European labour in preference to indigenous workers). We also need to keep out multi-millionaires who add nothing to our economy than increased property prices, and the plethora of servants that travel here (from outside the EU) to ease their indolence.

Labour is now officially a sideshow. Following Brexit and Scotland’s almost inevitable second stab at an independence vote at a time more or less of the SNP’s choosing, it will struggle to ever get into office again. The EU referendum result will now take second place to a three month Tory leadership campaign in which 150,000 party members will choose the British Prime Minister. Parliament is plainly not sovereign. The last two British PMs to resign in office were at least replaced in a vote of their party’s MPs. Cameron says the will of the British people cannot be ignored, but he has this morning used the powers vested in him by the royal sovereign to put exit negotiations on ice until his party’s latest little local difficulty is resolved.

The British people exercised their version of sovereignty in yesterday’s “advisory” referendum. They will (eventually) get their way. I do not think they will like the outcome. Overall migration will not go down that much, unemployment will rise - chiefly because of the decline in our EU-related trade and investment, rights for those in work will be weakened, tax revenues will fall and public services will very definitely be cut. British, or rather English, politics will be a debate conducted pretty far to the right, and the disaffection among those dispossessed by the impersonal economic forces unleashed by successive governments since the 1980s will grow. Perhaps into this void a reasonable sounding English nationalist will emerge. Nigel? Maybe this is genuinely what a majority of (English) voters would wish for.

Careful what you wish for: Brexit will feed popular anger, UK breakup and Labour irrelevance

This morning’s news confirmed the dread I felt going to bed last light. The Brexiteers have won. Just as disturbing are the domestic party political consequences. People who campaigned for the UK to Remain in the EU feared a Leave vote would parachute a more right wing Tory into No 10, in addition to unravelling employment protection legislation for British workers, and reducing living standards for all. 

Two of these three elements are already happening, although Boris and Gove may have to wait until October to see which of them claims the prize. A run on the pound, if sustained, will not only push up prices but put off badly needed foreign investors whose wealth we need to finance the growing deficit in trade and services. When it is freed from the “shackles” of the EU, an even more rightward Conservative Government will also be free to reduce British workers’ rights at work.

The new UK leadership will be under enormous pressure to confirm that a Leave vote will produce a major change in the one issue that sadly dominated the campaign: European immigration. Goodwill among remaining EU member states will be necessary for the UK to retain access to the European Single Market. It will be very hard to generate, whatever the claimed influence of domestic car makers over German chancellor, Angela Merkel. Why make secession from the EU seem relatively painless when you are desperately trying to keep the union together amidst bail outs and migration crises and the possibility of other member states, or at least their emboldened far right parties, seeking a similar vote? If the UK is not allowed to stay in the European Single Market then the common standards that the EU enforces – the right to holidays, and maternity and paternity pay, even for temporary workers – can be swept away by the new Tory administration.

Perhaps a change at the top of British politics in the context of UK negotiations with the EU over the terms of its exit will create a public clamour among a newly empowered British electorate for a UK General Election in the Autumn. After all, can the angry British public continue to say “What’s the point in voting, they’re all the same?” However, even a divided Tory Party would trash a Labour Party that firmly, and conservatively, sided with the status quo – remaining in the EU – especially one that may still be led by Jeremy Corbyn. The man who told working class Labour voters angry about deindustrialisation and welfare cuts that unlimited migration was a good thing sounded even more out of touch with Labour’s traditional values than the Blair acolytes he so roundly trounced in last year’s leadership election.

The last time the Labour Party faced a working class revolt over immigration it used the pragmatism of office to swiftly reduce it, specifically targeting Commonwealth immigration in hurried legislation issued in the wake of the mass appeal nationalism of Enoch Powell. Blair in government was disinterested in the contemporary version of these concerns, which is less about colour but is partly about culture and religion. Being a believer in neo-liberal economics he didn’t consider using the option of a five year delay to mass Polish immigration.

Middle class metropolitan liberals like to shop around in the multicultural store. Britain for them is about values, imperfect and contradictory as they may be, not culture or identity. Mr Brown famously said of a voter who was the epitome of traditional Labour support that she was “some bigoted old woman.” The EU referendum debate did not mention culture, the “c” word that still doesn’t get mentioned in polite political company, yet it was there all the time, just below the surface, and Remain had nothing to say about it. In fact the Remain campaign’s leading figures had precious little to say about immigration at all, other than it was simply a “good thing”, until the final stages when a few relatively centrist Labour figures mused unconvincingly about trying to restrict it from the rest of Europe.

We do need migrants, skilled and unskilled, but we also need to properly train our own workforce, enforce a genuine Living wage, clamp down on illegal immigrants, and punish hard those who sidestep our workers in favour of cheaper workers, wherever they come from. (The UK would actually have had the EU on its side if it got tough with UK-based companies who import cheaper European labour in preference to indigenous workers). We also need to keep out multi-millionaires who add nothing to our economy than increased property prices, and the plethora of servants that travel here (from outside the EU) to ease their indolence.

Labour is now officially a sideshow. Following Brexit and Scotland’s almost inevitable second stab at an independence vote at a time more or less of the SNP’s choosing, it will struggle to ever get into office again. The EU referendum result will now take second place to a three month Tory leadership campaign in which 150,000 party members will choose the British Prime Minister. Parliament is plainly not sovereign. The last two British PMs to resign in office were at least replaced in a vote of their party’s MPs. Cameron says the will of the British people cannot be ignored, but he has this morning used the powers vested in him by the royal sovereign to put exit negotiations on ice until his party’s latest little local difficulty is resolved.

The British people exercised their version of sovereignty in yesterday’s “advisory” referendum. They will (eventually) get their way. I do not think they will like the outcome. Overall migration will not go down that much, unemployment will rise - chiefly because of the decline in our EU-related trade and investment, rights for those in work will be weakened, tax revenues will fall and public services will very definitely be cut. British, or rather English, politics will be a debate conducted pretty far to the right, and the disaffection among those dispossessed by the impersonal economic forces unleashed by successive governments since the 1980s will grow. Perhaps into this void a reasonable sounding English nationalist will emerge. Nigel? Maybe this is genuinely what a majority of (English) voters would wish for.

The UK should not increase its military role in fighting ISIS

For what it is worth, this was my contribution to the tens of thousands no doubt unread submissions to Jeremy Corbyn's consultation on what stance he/Labour should take on Syria/ISIS etc:

“Extending the UK's role in the air war against ISIS has no clear legal basis nor is it likely to make the streets of the UK safer. Afghanistan, Libya and Iraq today have a significant Al-Qaida and/or ISIS presence despite (or partly because of) the UK's active role in western military intervention in these countries. The 7/7 attack on London was facilitated but not determined by training acquired in the territory of a functioning state, the UK/western ally Pakistan. There is no strategy for countering ISIS in Syria and Iraq that has a realistic prospect of convincing Sunni Arabs that these countries can be stitched back together with political and security guarantees for their community that lessen the appeal of violence as a tactical weapon. The (western allied) Sunni Arab-led Gulf states have not the will, capacity or political interest in putting themselves in the service of this community's ambitions in these countries - they are focused on obliterating perceptible Iranian allies in Yemen. Iran, Russia and even France to a degree are prioritising a Shia interest in Iraq and in Syria - as a strategic asset in the Iranian and even Russian case, and a lesser evil than ISIS in the eyes of France. There is no UN Security Council Resolution or No 10 plan that can overcome such deep-seated differences of interest on the ground or among the regional and international players in the conflict. Make sure that the UK does not increase its role in essentially sectarian territorial struggles of local actors egged on by comparably narrow regional interests, all in the misguided belief that the particular "evil" of ISIS somehow makes this war, this time, different and that our tools of choice will somehow, this time, have a different impact.”

Poetry, politics and song with Ragged Trousers and Hastings Friends

The Ragged Trousered Cabaret (RTC) and Hastings Friendship Group (HFG) came together for a gig at the welcoming Owl and Pussycat Lounge on Sunday to raise funds for HFG and to reflect on contemporary popular struggle.

RTC has a long history of cultural and political engagement, inspired by the famous book by the one time Hastings-based writer Robert Tressell and by the anti-trade union mood of the 1980s. Members of the print union Sogat originally formed the cabaret group in 1984 in Sutton, and subsequently famous names like Mike Myers and Harry Enfield trod its boards. In this collectivist spirit Ann Field began the evening with a long, and somewhat stern and pedagogic, talk about trade union struggle. Ann was mindful of the possible new beginning the day before with the election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader, and spoke of the latest Conservative legislative proposal to “reform” the unions. Ann though was much more preoccupied with her scheduled talk on the Wapping print dispute. It was fascinating to be reminded of the context and detail of that mid-1980s conflict. However, as there were few in the room not old enough, nor I suspect not engaged enough, to remember it well, Ann was preaching to the converted. Still, it was all in a good cause: for HFG and for remembering an emblematic setback for organised labour.

A poem by poet Tom O’Brien continuing the same broad theme was read out by Warren Davis. Not for children or the faint-hearted, it was sweary and simplistic and went down very well. 

Songs mostly in the spirit of workers' struggle were performed by HFG regular Tom Cole. He sang great interpretations of numbers by Woody Guthrie ("Ain’t Got No Home In This World" and "Pretty Boy Floyd"), Ewan McColl ("My Old Man") and Billy Bragg ("Between The Wars"). I am more familiar with Ian Dury’s “My Old Man”, an altogether less maudlin and less precious take on his working class father. “Between The Wars”, inevitably perhaps, did the business for an audience in no doubt as to where its allegiances, political and cultural, lay.

Tony Peak followed. He has a poetic slant on struggle too. The inspired “Bottle Alley” tells of poverty and misery in a renowned Hastings street. Tony disparagingly referred to his own daily writing of sonnets, but chose to perform some in song. His ode to the late local Labour leader Jeremy Birch, was equal parts Sixth Form and Shakespearian.

Pete Donohue, literary editor at Hastings Independent Press, is a lively performance poet. He poured through loose sheaves of paper, sometimes performing one before literally discarding another. Pete brought to life many of the street characters familiar to those who live in the area. He is also not afraid to “do dark” either, whether the audience could cope or not. 

Paul Crimin, a HFG stalwart, largely avoided the theme of the day. In fact, singing “I Don’t Want To Talk About It”, a song originally performed by Crazy Horse but made famous by Rod Stewart, was a surreal counterpart to the worker-orientation. However it’s a wonderful number. Paul introduced the equally powerful Tears for Fears’ song “It’s A Mad World” as reflecting how he felt after Corbyn's election i.e. the (welcome)“Alice in Wonderland”  mood that Tony Peak referred to earlier. Given the choice, many present and outside the room would probably prefer the possibly bumpy ride of a Jeremy Corbyn prime ministership to yet more wars of intervention under either a Tory or a Neo-Blairite administration.

"Song for Jeremy" was the second number performed in memory of the new Labour leader's namesake: the late, great Jeremy Birch. It was sung at his memorial service and many joined in on this occasion too (see picture below).

Sue Johns was for me the highlight of the night. An avowed Cornish speaker, feminist, shop girl, and, most importantly, a brilliant declaimer of her own verse. Sue’s poems alternated between the exquisite and the very funny. I wondered why she isn’t much better known, but that is probably just my ignorance. She appears to have had many works published after all, and has been in a number of anthologies, including one, “The Poems of Labour”, which contains, she noted, an introduction by Roy Hattersley, that cultural doyen and former Labour deputy leader. 

JC is arguably a return to the days when cultured people were at, or near, the top of the party, as opposed to the Blairite acolytes who engineered the tacky and downright dangerous takeover of our high streets by bookies and pay day lenders. A cultural reassertion would be no bad thing among those who wish to better the lot of labour rather than serve it up patronising estuary English and a professed love of pop and football. 

Sue works in a department store in the Kings Road Chelsea, a job that once, she said, saw her narrowly avoid an encounter with Lady Thatcher. The final line of the poem, “Shop Girl”, references her employer and her status, “Shop girl: never knowingly understood.” Another poem told of her desire to go down on Kirsty Wark whenever she sees her on Newsnight, whatever death, destruction and misery she is talking about. Sue’s final poem on the night, "Before The Pussy Riots", quoted the Quran, the Hindu text the Manusmriti, and Tennyson’s 'Charge of the Light Brigade' in a highly emotional account of honour, marriage and violence.

Patric Cunnane of RTC lightened the mood somewhat with his often hilarious poetic observations. One concerned a Cuban man employed by the state to put granny specs on the life-size John Lennon statue in Havana whenever tourists want to pose next to it. He then takes them off the statue in case they get stolen. 

The night finished, I am told, with a rousing musical performance by Rob Johnson. Following the sound of my stomach sadly meant that I had left before Rob started performing. Next time I’ll bring sandwiches to HFG’s sometimes quite long shows.

• The next HFG gig is this Sunday (September 20th) at the Gecko Bar, St Leonard's at 4pm. It is in aid of Horizons Community Learning. 

Corbyn threatens to unleash activists on elected Labour MPs

If I was remotely waivering about NOT voting for Jeremy Corbyn as Labour Party leader, the latest pronouncement of the man has clinched it for me. Corbyn is threatening to discipline elected representatives of the people (i.e. MPs) with the pressure of un-elected activists if Labour MPs don't back him as leader. 

If this sounds familiar it is partly what the neo-Blairites thought they could achieve by setting up the registered supporters scheme a couple of years ago. It is absolutely what Benn unleashed in the 1970s and '80s. 

Remember "extra-parliamentary action"? Benn used it, and the force of his acolytes and Troskiyite fellow-travellers in the Party, to try and force his way into the leadership of the party against the wishes of many elected Labour MPs and of the then party leader Jim Callaghan and then Michael Foot (both far greater men than JC could ever dream of being). 

It was Foot who, as leader, told the Party Conference in 1981 that "Labour Party democracy" has to be a marriage of what the members want and what the Parliamentary Labour Party wants. Foot knew his history - Labour history and British democratic history. The semi-Burkean in him didn't believe that MPs were elected by the public to be told what to do by party activists accountable to no one but themselves.