De-select the Labour war-mongers

A kinder politics was never going to be enough to reverse a generation of Blairism. Unless Corbyn was willing to do battle with those that have hi-jacked Labour I always thought that Corby-mania could be a bubble. I just didn't expect it to burst quite so quickly. But today's 'free vote' on Syria is probably going to do just that.

I am struggling to think of any scenario when parties can legitimately say 'we have no position on this issue vote how you like' . Because that is what a free vote means. Traditional matter of conscience like capital punishment or abortion perhaps ? But surely these are political issues for society not just quirks of personal preference. And taking the country to war by beginning with air strikes against a civilian population is about as political as it gets.

A majority of Labour members and supporters opposes these air strikes. The Labour leadership opposes these air strikes. And yet the Blairites are being allowed to vote against this without incurring the wrath of their whips and damaging their careers. It is argued that a movement of Labour rebels voting with the government would open up a chasm and damage the party. But that chasm is there and it has been evident ever since Corbyn took over. 

De-selection of these MPs who vote for war needs to start now.

Paris attacks

In these dark times it is unavoidable to be nervous that the terrible attacks that happened in Paris on Friday could happen in any major city. But I am more nervous about the consequences of the reactionary backlash that has already started. So it's worth examining a couple of myths that have already become a mantra:

The myth that terrorists have piggy-backed the refugee crisis and by implication the asylum doors should now be slammed shut: Many refugees are fleeing because they are trying to escape from these kind of terrorist attacks. And these attacks are happening on a regular basis in parts of the Middle East with no media coverage at all. The day before the Paris attack suicide bombers killed 40 people in Beirut - and this hardly caused a ripple in the world's media.

The myth that multi-cultural society is a breeding ground for radical Islamism. It is sadly no accident France has been targeted - it is a very different kind of society to Britain - or most of Northern Europe for that matter: The official policy of aggressive secularism that bans the headscarf and obliges schools to serve pork; the ghettoization of major cities that have created a marginalised immigrant underclass in the suburbs; and the systematic racism of French police who still exercise stop and search in the manner of British police in the 1970s. It is the very lack of multiculturalism that has created layer of angry Muslim young men has been created that is a fertile recruiting found for Islamo-fascism and this is reflected in there being more French nationals fighting with IS than from any other European country.

Momentum - and the lack of momentum for anti-austerity

I went to my first local meeting of the Corbyn-ite  Momentum initiative last night. I would say roughly a third of the meeting were familiar activists from outside of the Labour Party and the remainder Labour members. It was a packed meeting but conspicuous by their absence were the much discussed 'new layers' drawn in by the campaign.The meeting was rambling but two clear positions did seem to come out:

There was the 'Labour Left' call of come and join us: Reinvigorate the party with campaigns, but most of all start now to make sure that Labour win the next election. And then there was the 'other view': Corbyn's victory was a victory for anti-austerity,  so let's make Labour an anti-austerity party right now by refusing to implement Tory policies at local level.

But the Labour Left say that their councillors won't argue for deficit budgets`- and within the party they won't call for mandatory re-selection to purge the party of those Blairite entrists who won't give up their neo-liberalism. 

And  so a chasm remains between  Corbyn-ite Labour  and  those of us who welcome his victory but are outside of the party.  Creating a 'kinder politics' and talking about a 'social movement' is all well and good, but if we are actually going to fight Tory austerity , growing some balls would be good too.

Return of the grammar schools

By some legal sleight of hand the Tories have managed to give the go-ahead to opening a new grammar school in Kent. Despite their protests to the contrary,without a doubt it now opens the door to the completion of a rose-tinted vision originally  started by Michael  Gove that will take us all back to the selective education of his youth.

At the last election the saloon-bar experts of UKIP were cheerleading this vision with a slogan of 'a grammar school in every town'. Strangely the slogan that must inevitably accompany this - 'three secondary moderns in every town' - is never heard. 

Because quite simply selection meant that the majority of kids got a second-rate education: The Tories' latest decision  will mean the same - if not more so. Within a few years we will have with a second tier of schools filled up with unqualified teachers and kids taking highly dubious vocational courses in hospitality studies and retail service.

The selection process was unfair back in Gove's golden age - and it will be even more unfair now. In the age of the internet and an ever-growing private tuition industry class buys cultural privilege more than ever before. More young people may be going to university than ever before but this does not represent genuine social mobility. For many working class kids, the entry to the job market has simply been delayed by a few years and they then take up low-status, low-paid service jobs burdened with debt and qualifications of questionable value. The austerity crisis-economy of the 2010s simply doesn't need the new wave of technocrats that booming Britain did in the 1960s - and so the carrot of  social mobility has become little more than an illusion to placate the aspirational.

I get that whilst people might acknowledge this at a societal level, they still want the best for their own kids. That's the old mantra: parental choice. But where does this end? If you're white are you obliged to be racist because it maintains your  kids privilege? If you have sons should you be sexist so as to keep the gender imbalance in their favour? Because make no mistake, selection can only ever perpetuate social injustice.

And I have to acknowledge that I myself benefitted, albeit indirectly, from selection: My own school was a suburban comprehensive that had been a grammar within the memory of many of the teaching staff. So we had decent playing fields, played rugby and had a few teachers who had high academic expectations. We also had, I see in retrospect a social and educational apartheid that divided the O-Level and CSE streams. I am very grateful that nowadays I work  in a genuine comprehensive with a socially, ethnically and academically diverse intake. Long may that last - I fear we are an endangered species.

Class war target hipsters?

The protest at Cereal Killers has got people talking about gentrification so in a sense I suppose it has already done it's job.

My first reaction when I saw the shop that charges about four quid for a bowl of cereal being trashed was good riddance. Then my second reaction when I saw a piece beyond parody  in the Guardian from the hipster brothers who own the shop explaining that they didn't just sell cereal for but also provided an  experience that restored people's childhood memories was again, good riddance.

Initially the story  touched a nerve I guess because my own area is starting a process of gentrification - and hipsters are providing the advance party of the bourgeois. 

But really, men with silly beards are not the problem: Property developers who are speculating in properties in working class communities are the problem. Local councils (many of them Labour) who are selling off social housing and collaborating with austerity and socially-cleansing inner city city areas are the problem.

Poor areas have always attracted the bohemian elements of the middle class. I imagine the Victorian workers  were bemused and irritated by artists with silly beards slumming it in the East End drinking absinthe and smoking opium. But they weren't the class enemy - slum landlords charging rack rents for some of the worst living conditions in Europe were. 

The modern day equivalents of all these groups are still with us. Let's not get distracted. 

Jeeza-buzz

School's back and there's that new term buzz. In more ways than one. Jeremy Corbyn's victory seems to mark a new start.

Not in the sense that a credible socialist  Labour has suddenly arisen phoenix-like from the ashes of Blairism: It's too early to say that, and I have to say that sadly that scenario looks like the least likely outcome. Corbyn's apparent rejection of mandatory re-selection would indicate that he lacks the steel for the bitter war that is now  necessary to drive out the Blairite entrists that have polluted the party. Many local party organisations are simply moribund and it has suited the Blairites at local level to keep it that way so they can maintain a strangle hold on selection. If the re-selection of candidates is not mandatory then it seems highly unlikely that the required clearing out of the parliamentary Labour party will be possible. And without that, Corbyn is ultimately doomed.

The most important thing is that 'Corbyn-mania'  has put politics, socialist politics back into everyday life. My daughters, both under 21 are enthused by a politician who is principled and non-plastic and have been glued to the unfolding drama this week around Prime Minister's Question Time and anthem-gate. My dad who is pushing 90 has also watched it all avidly - and is even considering rejoining the Labour Party. And amongst my colleagues not a lunch or break time goes by without some discussion of Jeeza.

Of course this buzz maybe just a moment that will  pass sooner or later. But for those of us who aren't in the Labour Party there must be some opportunity to engage with this and start discussing some of the basic ideas of socialism and struggle - and maybe even build something new out of it.

Purged!

Since my last post, having followed the unfolding fiasco of the Labour leadership contest, I am not particularly surprised to reveal that it appears that I have been 'purged' from participating in the election as a supporter. I say 'it appears' because I have simply not been sent a ballot. In true Orwellian fashion no reason needs to be given and the decision cannot be appealed unless I go through the process of applying for full membership. It goes without saying that my £3 donation is non-refundable.

As I wrote  previously, voting in the ballot was never  a serious strategy to reclaim Labour - rather more  a cheeky  'a last throw of the dice' - but it has had a serious side effect: Whether or not Jeremy Corbyn is allowed to become leader by the Blair-ites, socialist 'values' have being embraced by swathes of  previously uninvolved young people and an older generation of ativists has been reinvigorated. In this respect the Left has already won. What happens next will be messy and complicated and I suspect will involve some false starts to start a new organisation to capture this mood - but things are not going to be the same.

Entrism?

I am getting flashbacks to the days of 'reader's meetings' back in  80s with red-scare stories popping up about 'entrism' in the Labour Party. 

But let's be clear what is currently happening with the Corbyn campaign is nothing to do with the kind of tactics that some of us pursued in the days of Militant. It's very simple - the effect that we are seeing with people signing up as supporters is the result of a massive mis-calculation by the New Labour leadership that confirms how out of touch they have been for some time with public opinion.

Those who have signed up as supporters in order to vote for Corbyn are in the main people who have decided to get involved for the very time - or been re-vitalised - because they finally see an alternative to the austerity agenda. A very small number of these people might already be members of other organisations who have no intention of joining the Labour party, , but nonetheless support Corbyn's campaign. I am one of these people and I see no problem with this either constitutionally or ethically.

Constitutionally, New Labour adopted a US-style primary system because it mistakenly believed that this would build in a permanent in-built majority for the 'mythical centre'. Supposedly because most people are naturally repelled by radical ideas. Hmmm. This has now clearly come back and bit Labour in the arse,  but it is entirely legitimate within a primary system where alliances and special interest groups will ebb and flow.

And ethically - well Labour has always been an ideological and tactical battleground from the days when it was first founded. As a federal party with affiliated union membership policy has always been shaped by people who aren't actually members. And when it comes to accepting the broad values of Labour (whatever those are these days) I am pretty sure that I am a damn sight closer than Tory entrists like Liz Kendall.

Ironically there is a very sensible piece on this by Michael Crick - the man who wrote the hatchet job about 'real' entrism back in the 80's.

One last throw of the dice?

The Labour Party and I parted company back in 1991. In the meantime we've seen New Labour, Blair, the ditching of Clause 4, a couple of illegal wars, breaking the Trade Union link and countless other acts of betrayal that would get Nye Bevan spinning in his grave.

So it was with some deliberation that I paid my £3 and registered as a 'Labour supporter' in order to be able to vote for Jeremy Corbyn. 

He's a rare thing in politics generally these days, a decent guy who still  has some fundamental socialist values. But even so I have no illusions about him or his potential to reverse the party's downward spiral. Should he actually win the leadership I fear that he is so out of sync with the rest of the repugnant parliamentary Labour Party, that within a few weeks  there will probably be a palace  coup amongst the  MPs to oust him.

But despite all this, when I saw that acting party boss Harriet Harman had instructed Labour MPs to abstain on the most vicious piece of Tory legislation since the days of Thatcher, whilst the Lib Dems and even some rebel Tories were voting against the Welfare Reform Bill, I thought it was worth one desperate last throw of dice ...

From Baltimore to Waco: folk-devils and paranoid cops

A couple of weeks ago there was the 'biker shoot out' at Waco Texas. Predictably stories of the shootings that left nine dead and 170 arrested were accompanied in the media by regurgitated 'layman's guides' to the workings of outlaw MC's. The implication was that the events has just scratched the surface, and that hordes of lawless and nihilistic folk-devils were lurking not far beneath. 

Now that the dust has settled a different story is starting to emerge: The biker meeting at the Twin Peaks diner was not some pre-arranged stand-off lifted from the script of a B-movie, but a regional meeting of the Coalition of Clubs - a riders' rights organisation the like of which we have in this country. Eyewitnesses say that most of the shots fired came not from bikers but from the police. Video footage mostly shows unarmed bikers diving for cover once shooting from a distance starts. One of those killed has since revealed to have been not an outlaw but a member of of a veterans' club who was  decorated with a Purple Heart in Vietnam. In fact many of the 170 arrested are not 1%-ers,  but members of what in the states are called mom-and-pop clubs -  or MCCs over here in the UK - with no criminal records. 

It's an all too-familiar picture of an overly-empowered police force with a culture of gung-ho machismo fuelled by a paranoid fear of 'the other. And it's worth remembering at this point that the  Waco bikers were largely blue-collar whites - or in other words the same demographic as most of the redneck law-enforcement. Throw in a large dose of not-so latent racism too, and as we have seen in Fergusson, Baltimore and in fact all over the US in the past year, there is something very rotten in the state of America. 

Eight elections - don't moan organise

I can't believe that I have now lived through EIGHT general elections. 

1983 - the Falklands election and the first time I voted. I still have my copy of the much derided 'suicide note' manifesto. Thirty years on it seems like a pretty decent programme

1987 - and Kinnock had already started the rot in Labour with his notorious conference speech attacking Liverpool Council. I was fully immersed in Johnny Bryan's election campaign in Bermondsey. Ironically the constituency covered Labour HQ at Walworth Road,  and so whilst we were campaigning against Thatcher, the party appratchiks were  pre-occuied snooping on us.

1992, having seen off the poll tax and got kicked out of Labour in the process,  I was  riding up to Coventry most weekends to help out there with Dave Nellist's 'Real Labour' campaign. Somehow Kinnock managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory

1997 - and  everyone was getting excited with a landslide for 'New' Labour, but I was left out in the cold. Even so,  whilst Blair repelled me,  seeing the humiliation of the Tories gave me a brief frisson of pleasure .  I got briefly excited about the possibility of a new formation called 'Socialist Labour' but was this was then swiftly dispelled when  Scargill's ego strangled the new party at birth. '

2001- and a new formation had emerged  - The Socialist Alliance. But by the time of the  election, sectarian squabbling had ensured that this had imploded. Even so, with no alternative in my own area, I ended up voting for them - actually the first time that I had voted anything other than Labour.

2005  - by then even my dad who had joined the Labour Party in 1946 after hearing Nye  Bevan, had  resigned in protest over the Iraq war. Locally, I had no choice but to hold my nose and vote for Respect despite the stench of their opportunist cozy-ing up to religious 'mentalists. 

2010 - and the Trade Union and Socialist Coalition TUSC was off to a fragile stuttering start. It was a great campaign in my area and we genuinely managed to transcend the sectarian nonsense that had always cursed the Left. In Tottenham Labour voters stayed at home, and elsewhere many simply didn't see the difference between Tories and Labour, and so chose the former because they had the good fortune not to have presided over the banking crisis and an unpopular war 

2015 - again a very healthy local TUSC campaign was a breath of fresh air in a depressing atmosphere of austerity-acceptance. In this part of London,  despite a totally invisible local campaign, Labour bucked the trend and significantly increased its vote. Elsewhere ... well again the Turkeys have voted for Christmas and even more have chosen to stay indoors and hope it all goes away.

The many ages of Russell Brand

When a  lot of people thought that Russell Brand was a twat I was inclined to stick up for him. He may have been  overly-pleased with his own smart-arsery and indulged this egotistically with a painfully self-conscious verbosity,  but I still had a soft spot for him. 

Perhaps because as a teacher, I am used to clever and precocious sixth formers who want to show off that they have swallowed a dictionary, and are using it to pass off ideas that have been bleeding obvious to everyone else for many years. As if they were rare insights that they alone have just discovered. And when you're 17 or 18, that's ok. In fact it can be quite sweet. 

But of course if you're a grown man with a minor celebrity status which allows you to  market the bleeding obvious as some sort of original revolutionary manifesto,  it's rather less sweet. However, despite the fact that he is actually only 10years younger than me, I regarded  Russell as some sort of hyper-active man-child, so  I was still willing to indulge him. 

But  in his latest about-face call for a Labour vote it seems that Russell has now moved on from being the precocious sixth former to the rather nauseating trusti-farian brat who having spent a summer working at daddy's firm and been taken to lunch with the grown ups, has now decided that he must change the system from the inside. 

Non-doms

Non-doms are back in the news. What is extraordinary is not that Labour are finally talking about abolishing the tax loop-hole for the super-rich, but that it has survived so long - and nobody has been screaming about this real benefit-scrounging.

Income tax dates from the need to pay for the Napoleonic wars - and from the very start there were some built-in dodges to enable those who could really afford to pay tax to avoid paying any at all.

The fig-leaf rationale for this at the time was empire building. If people pledged not to bring their income from overseas in to the country they were exempt from being taxed. In the pre-1857 British Empire when imperialism was essentially mercantile rather than governmental this had some of logic. Empire-building before the Great Rebellion in India was an early form of PFI with private individuals given only limited support from the state.  The system incentivized the younger sons of the nobility, aspirational social risers, and other assorted chancers escaping the rigid hierarchy of British society, to become minor potentates  in far flung parts of the world. Where they could live lives of opulence and decadence undreamed of in the home country. And so in some sense the tax dodge helped build the empire.

Nowadays the idea of ring-fencing overseas wealth  makes no sense from any point of view. Over the years the grounds for claiming non-dom status have become even more spurious - it is now more about having a foreign born parent or a bank account registered abroad than it is about owning a tea plantation. In fact there is no real pretence that it is anything other than a dodge for the super-rich.  

Apologists for this system argue that its abolition would drive the super-rich from this country. However this supposes that the hidden hand of the market somehow ensures that a trickle down effect ensures that we all receive some benefit from the mere presence of the super-rich regardless of whether they are actually building factories in this country or just counting the interest on their off-shore bank accounts. In fact on a practical basis it actually discourages the bringing back of real investment into this country - which of course would be taxable. 

Getting rid of this should hardly be controversial - no other country in the world has such a blatantly unfair and illogical loophole - but it will not be easily given up. It is emblematic of the perversity of the system we live under.

An everyday story

Last weekend I spent Saturday afternoon leafleting a nearby estate for TUSC. I did it in the company of a bloke I'd not met before. He was a council worker who had got involved in the election campaign largely because his job was threatened by the latest (and deepest) cuts package from Haringey Council. In the course of a few hours trudging around the estate we swapped life stories. I thought it was worth sharing his:

Pete had served an engineering apprenticeship and worked in various manufacturing jobs until he was made redundant by new technology. Then he went to work for the Post Office. He knew that he would never earn the same amount as he had as a skilled tradesman, but he was willing to trade this for security. But after ten years he was again made redundant. After sometime of unemployment, he went to work for the council as a street cleaner. Until that service was contracted out to a private firm - which is now laying people off in response to the council's budget cuts. He is now over 60 and is looking at the options of voluntary redundancy as he is not sure in any case how many years he has left when he continue to be doing manual work outdoors every day of the year. He is  pretty sure that when he does go, probably in the next few months, he will not work again.

An unremarkable story perhaps, but it encapsulates everything that has got wrong with our society over the past 20 years - and has been experienced by millions.

A new Greek dawn?

Waking up to the news that SYRIZA have won the Greek elections and are about to form a government is a pretty good way to start the week.

And before anybody says it, I do know that Tsipras isn't the messiah and that Greece is not on the brink of constructing a workers' paradise. 

But SYRIZA's success does  represent the most  significant development in Europe since the world economic crisis began. It is not just some  re-alignment of the forces of the Far Left - it has given voice to a mass movement that rejects the politics of austerity.

Of course  lots of questions remain, and a lot of hard messy work to replicate the same kind of force elsewhere - whether it's Podemos in Spain, the Anti-Austerity Alliance in Ireland ... or TUSC at home.

Je suis ... un ouvrier du monde

Excuse my French. 

I'll admit I rushed to publish a 'Je suis Charlie' status on Facebook in outrage at the shootings last week.  Then I very nearly posted another  'Je suis Ahmed' status. Then I saw that there was even a 'Je suis policier' status doing the rounds. And that made me think - hang on, is that the same policiers who I have witnessed routinely harassing young people of North African descent on the street of Paris? Or the paramilitary thugs of the CRS? 

Maybe we should all think a bit more carefully about some of this stuff:

There are inspiring demonstrations in London and Paris today. Displaying feelings of outrage at bigotry; and feelings of unity across communities; and  fear of  an anti-Muslim  backlash. But also displaying  political opportunism on the part of leaders like Netanyahu who want to promote anything but unity.

 

I am hearing a lot of genuine confusion amongst the liberal-minded:

When does ridiculing religion turn into racism?

Just because you have a right to do something does it mean that you should?

Can we really talk about freedom of speech in an unequal society with a gulf between minorities and the dominant culture?

Fair enough. These things can and must be discussed - but it's also worth remembering that the only real answer to these horrors is a radical one, and it has  been around for a while: 'Workers of all lands unite  - you have a world to win.'

Charlie Hebdo - in defence of blasphemy

I have never understood the concept of blasphemy.

If you are in a position of authority - a teacher, a manager, a team captain or a parent there is no surer sign of your confidence and authority than to take the piss out of yourself or to allow others to do so. In fact it is almost an acid-test of your authority if it can survive ridicule. As a human being, the same ability is actually a test of your humanity - to fail it renders you at best pompous and at worst psychotic.

So why should the  (supposedly)  biggest boss of all any different? 

Woody Allen quipped that God may be omnipotent but he clearly has self-esteem issues. Which I guess is why all religions seem to have a supreme being who requires constant reassurance in the form of worship and who is strictly off-limits from any kind of ridicule.

Following the latest obscene attack in Paris by Islamo-fascists on those who dared to mock them and their ridiculous medieval world view, we are inevitably going to see a wave of vicious Islamo-phobia. However, the best, and only, response, is to emphasize the unity of our common humanity - and to continue fearlessly taking the piss. 

Just as the cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo did.

The truth about white vans.

White van man-gate has made me chuckle. Labour now seem to approach the issue of class as if they were tip-toeing their way through a minefield. Much as the liberal left used to (and often still do) when it comes to the issue of race. In both cases it is symptomatic of a profound detachment from the group they are trying to speak about. So regardless of whether it is  well-intentioned patronising or blatant snobbery, there is an in-built self-destructive impulse for Labour politicians to make  complete twats of themselves.

Miliband said that Emily Thornberry's recent tweet taking the piss out of a white van and St George's flag in Rochester made him 'absolutely furious'. Much more so apparently than the constant onslaught on ordinary people from the ConDem's austerity programme or UKIP's vicious xenophobia aimed  to split the working class vote.

In an uncharacteristically passionate speech, Miliband says in defence of the St George's flag that whenever he sees it he thinks immediately of Shakespeare and Henry V. Really Ed? I think you protest too much. 

These days there is no denying when most ordinary people see it, they think at best of English football -  and at worst they think of the EDL.

And of course there's ambiguity in all of this. 

It turns out that Thornberry herself grew up in a council house - unlike Ed who was a card carrying member of the chattering classes from birth. Then in a PR salvage exercise it was revealed that her brother is actually a builder - and there's a photo of him having a cuppa in the cafe wearing his hi-viz waistcoat. But hang on, it turns out that the brother is also an award-winning photojournalist. 

And as for all that talk about Islington-ites - only someone who has never actually been to Islington could talk that way. Come to the Hillside estate just up the road from my school - or look at the statistic that half of the children in the borough live in poverty. Despite building the spiritual homeland of New Labour, Islington is still, like much of 'gentrified' London, fundamentally a working class area.

The truth is that class is complicated: Working class 'culture' is complicated: Some of it is positive, that sense of solidarity and community - and sense of humour - that the poe-faced middle class will never get. But other aspects of it - such as ignorance and bigotry - are frankly just shit and depressing. And it's OK to say that.

Strike !

This is the third day of me being on strike. One day last week - and now two days this week. 

Not national strikes with a day-out in central London and a few pints in the afternoon - but a proper local dispute against the school management and the local authority, complete  and some vicious national and local press coverage. And with all the fall-out and personalised bitterness that comes with it.

Not striking for pay or pensions or 'standing up for education' but over a really fundamental principle that employers do not get to chose who they negotiate with. Even bloody Boris accepted that he had to deal with Bob Crow. And what employer or manager  would not  like to negotiate with a representatitive who wasn't 'confrontational'?

Anyway - if you want the details of the case, it is well covered over here.

You'd think that after all these years I'd be immune to the lies of the press and the fuck-wittery that it produces in some people. Even so it still makes my blood boil to read some of the crap over at the Mail Online. Apparently it has come as complete revelation that such a thing as paid union facility even exists - or worse still - that unions sometimes pay strike pay. 

We're all Scots now

Right now, watching the ruling class scurrying to Edingburgh in panic with 'ten days to save the union' - I am wishing I was Scottish. 

What is happening in Scotland at the moment is nothing to do with Braveheart nationalism or  tartan sentimentalism. It is about ordinary people sticking two fingers up at decades of ruling class neglect and  of being ruled by far away toffs who have no understanding of the lives of a people.  In return  these ordinary people have consistently not given a political mandate to these toffs and are now serving notice on them.

I feel the same way - and I only live a few miles up the road from Westminster.

Once Scotland gains its independence - do you think there any chance of a plebiscite in North London for us to be annexed ?