Can the Red Wall trust Labour on Brexit and immigration?
A couple of recent videos for you to enjoy (or not, as the case may be!). First, I was glad to be invited on to Spectator TV – the magazine’s broadcast channel – to discuss the question of whether the Red Wall can trust a future Labour government on Brexit and immigration. Regular readers will know that I have been very critical of Labour’s stance on these two issues for many years. In this 20-minute discussion, I warn Labour not to betray working-class voters on these matters, and I explain what I think the implications might be if it does.
Second, I popped up as a panellist on GB News’s Dewbs & Co, alongside outgoing Conservative MP Dehenna Davison. Topics under discussion included the prospect of future tax rises (and in particular whether the main parties were being honest with voters), Labour’s proposal to make it easier for people to change ‘gender’, and whether Nigel Farage was right to say that Nato and the EU had provoked Russia over Ukraine.
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I agree fully with your list of what Labour should focus on, but the Labour party that advanced the condition of ordinary people died in 1979. Apart from interludes with more radical left elements which repel ordinary voters, it is now the party of performative progressivism, an entirely upper middle class, wealthy project the despises and in truth hates ordinary people. It will do nothing of what you suggest, but will pursue progressivism, constrained only by the fact that what has been done already has totally bankrupted the country. Personally, my prediction is that in five years time there will be millions more disenfranchised and disillusioned voters to join those who thought in 2019 that the Tories finally got the need for fundamental change. I see us as not ahead of the convulsions sweeping Europe and America, nor as having swerved them, but five years behind. I think things are only going to get a lot worse.
Nigel didn’t go far enough on the NATO/ Russia/ Ukraine situation. The list of people who assured Russia that NATO wouldn’t expand east of Germany at the end of the Cold War reads like a ‘who’s who’ of the great Western statesmen of the late 1980s/ early 1990s. Unfortunately, the politicians who followed these heavyweights didn’t keep their word.
There is also compelling evidence that the CIA was involved in the overthrow of former Ukrainian (and pro-Russian) President Yanukovych in the 2014 Maidan Revolution, while a recent New York Times expose detailed the large number of CIA bases set up in Ukraine after that event.
After Maidan, ethnic Russians in the Donbas area of Ukraine suffered 8 years of persecution, including shelling, at the hands of the Kyiv government, which left thousands dead. Yes, Russia got involved there too, albeit covertly, but what do you expect?
As for Crimea, it was tit for tat after Maidan, and don’t forget that the overwhelming majority of Crimeans saw themselves as part of Russia, not Ukraine.
Quite simply, the West has used Ukraine to try and weaken Russia. We have used a brave people to fight a cowardly proxy war. Your citing of the Cuban Missile Crisis and Mexico/ Canada analogy explains what did/ would happen if this was the other way round.
Once Biden gave Ukraine the green light to apply to join NATO in late 2021, Russia was finally pushed over the edge and invaded Ukraine. That was regrettable, and has had appalling consequences, but what else could it do with its national security so badly compromised?
The real victims in all this are, of course, primarily the ordinary Ukrainian people, but the idea that at a political level it’s a case of NATO good/ Russia bad is laughably naive.
If anyone thinks my views are parroting Russian propaganda, try reading articles from the quality Western MSM prior to this conflict, which paint a completely different picture to everything we’ve been told by it since.