Is Britain about to elect the Hoborn & St Pancras answer to Robespierre?
Will Lloyd wrote in The Times today that "Labour are in a punitive mood."
The Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer, never lets anyone forget that he was once Director of Public Prosecutions, and sometimes acts more as if he still is than he did when he was actually still in the job. Some people - especially in his own party - might wish he had gone after criminals when he was DPP as ruthlessly as he has purged members of his own party who dare to take a different view.
I can't help wondering if the present leader of the opposition is the Holborn & St Pancras version of a modern Robespierre.
Cross them, and they'll come for you: it might be a more modern and civilised purge than a tumbril to take you to the guillotine, but they'll come for you nonetheless.
The journalist Michael Crick has an interesting take on this which you can find on Facebook at
I hope I won't annoy too many of my Conservative colleagues by saying that I think Michael Crick has performed an important democratic function over the last few years by reporting on how all the parties pick their candidates to be MPs. All parties including my own need to think hard about whether we need to make further improvements in how we pick our candidates. But what Michael Crick's work has publicised is that the sort of outrageous stick-up we saw in the Labour selection for the constituency of Copeland which I previously fought, a stitch-up resulting in the mass resignation of local Labour officials, has been repeated again and again around the country.
(And I do mean Copeland, not Whitehaven and Workington - one of the many questionable aspects of that selection was that Labour deliberately selected on old boundaries which were about to be abolished rather than the ones to be used for this election. It was suggested, not by Conservatives but by voices in the local Labour party, that this was done to disadvantage a local candidate who was not in any way unsuitable and indeed is standing for Labour in a neighbouring seat but who wasn't the candidate favoured by the London leadership for that particular constituency.)
Michael Crick outs himself in the video linked to above as "right-wing Labour" e.g. exactly the part of the political spectrum on which Starmer has parked his tanks, but explains that
"I won't be voting for Labour at this election" because of the way the Starmer faction has purged their opponents, which he calls "one of the most disgraceful episodes in modern Labour party history."
And if that's how the Labour party leadership treat their own MPs, candidates and activists, how are they going to treat the rest of us?
We've seen hints of it. You can see signs of their vindictiveness towards independent schools - a policy they have doubled down on even though the policy, as Emily Thornberry admitted, this is more likely to hurt state school pupils by increasing classroom overcrowding than to help them.
You had another hint of Sir Keir Starmer's attitude to those who make sacrifices to get better care for their family in the TV debate when he said that he would never under any circumstances use private healthcare for his family. I can't decided if this was more horrifying if it was a lie or if it was actually true.
To paraphrase Neil Kinnock, if Labour win
- I warn you not to be the kind of person who makes sacrifices to get something better for your family
- I warn you not to stick your head above the parapet and stand in the way of a Labour government
- I warn you not to have the kind of views the Islington establishment doesn't like
- I warn you not to be different in the "wrong" ways
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