The New York Times posted:

LONDON — Prime Minister Theresa May of Britain on Tuesday called for a snap election for June 8, clearly anxious that her thin majority in Parliament would weaken her hand in complicated negotiations on the British exit from the European Union.

In breaking her often-repeated vow not to call an early election before 2020, Mrs. May emphasized the need for unity in Parliament before undertaking what promises to be complex and tortuous negotiations on Britain’s exit from the bloc, or “Brexit.”

“The country is coming together, but Westminster is not,” Mrs. May said in a sudden appearance outside the prime minister’s residence at 10 Downing Street, adding that she had “only recently and reluctantly come to this conclusion.”

Having fired the starting gun for two years of talks with Brussels and the other 27 members of the European Union only last month, Mrs. May is already facing divisions within her own Conservative Party. She is clearly counting on a strong performance in June — before those talks get serious and difficult, before the British economy is seen to be hit and before critical German elections in the fall — to carry her government through the exit, hard or soft, which she has promised to deliver.

Reuters posted:

Opposition gains in British polls, but May's party keeps strong lead

Three opinion polls showed a rise in support for Britain's opposition Labour Party, although Prime Minister Theresa May's Conservatives maintained a commanding lead ahead of a June 8 election expected to define the terms of the country's EU exit.

The polls published late on Saturday showed May's Conservatives remained between 11 and 17 points ahead of Labour - still enough to deliver a clear victory as she seeks a mandate for her plan to implement the result of last year's Brexit referendum by quitting the European Union's single market.

However, the polls showed the gap had closed from leads of up to 25 points reported last weekend.

One poll by YouGov showed the Conservative lead over the Labour had fallen to 13 points, compared to the 23 points that the same polling firm found last week.

The YouGov poll for the Sunday Times found that 44 percent were set to back the Conservatives, down from 48 percent last weekend. Support for Labour climbed to 31 percent from 25 percent.

"It looks as if some 2015 Labour voters who were saying 'don't know' a week ago are now saying Labour," wrote YouGov Research Director Anthony Wells for ukpollingreport.co.uk.

Business Insider posted:

Exclusive poll: Jeremy Corbyn is now a bigger vote-winner than Tony Blair

-Voters are more likely to vote for Labour led by Corbyn than led by Tony Blair, Ed Miliband, Yvette Cooper, or Sadiq Khan according to a Business Insider poll.
-Tony Blair is the most toxic potential leader of the party with 61% saying they would not even consider voting Labour if he returned.
-Cooper is the least toxic, with fewer voters saying she would be a deal-breaker for their vote.
-Findings come as Blair considers a return to frontline British politics.
-The Tories lead Labour by 20 points.


LONDON — More people would consider voting for the Labour Party under its current leader Jeremy Corbyn than they would if the party were led by Tony Blair, an exclusive Business Insider / GfK poll has found.

Tony Blair has recently made a high-profile return to British politics, saying that he wants to "get [my] hands dirty" in the battle for Brexit and Labour's future.

However, our poll found that Blair is now a significantly more toxic figure than Corbyn.

We asked voters whether they would consider voting for Labour were it led by either Corbyn, Blair, Miliband, London mayor Sadiq Khan or rumoured future leadership candidate Cooper.

Blair was the most toxic of all the potential Labour leaders polled, with 61% saying they would not even consider voting for Labour were the party led by him, compared to just 23% who said they would.

Corbyn, by contrast, was the most popular candidate listed, with 31% saying they would consider voting Labour under his leadership as opposed to 53% who would not.

The poll found that Corbyn was more popular than either Miliband, Cooper or Khan. However, fewer respondents said that Cooper and Khan would be a deal-breaker for their vote than Corbyn, suggesting they have potential to change public perceptions of the party. Cooper had the best net ratings overall.

"Yvette Cooper’s numbers are interesting," GfK Research Director Keiran Pedley said. "She is clearly the least toxic of the Labour politicians we tested but it is fair to say that she remains something of an unknown quantity for now among the British public, therefore voters are hardly clamouring for her to lead the Labour Party yet."

The findings suggest that simply changing leaders would not cause an immediate improvement in Labour's fortunes and could even make Labour's position worse.

The Telegraph posted:

The document is likely to reinforce concerns that Mr Corbyn is soft on defence, law and order and migration.

Critics will also cite it as evidence that Labour plans to “soak the rich” with a huge tax raid on high earners and businesses, in a week when both Mr Corbyn and the shadow chancellor John McDonnell praised the works of Karl Marx

quote:

A Labour source warned it is "Ed Miliband's manifesto with hard left hundreds and thousands sprinkled on top".

They added that union leaders have been bought off with special pledges including promises to look again at pensions, scrap driver-only trains and offer an inquiry into the battle of Orgreave during the 1984 miner's strike.

Business Insider posted:

LONDON — Labour's leaked manifesto pledges are hugely popular with the public according to a new poll for Jeremy Corbyn's party.

According to a poll by Comres for the Daily Mirror, the following plans have majority support from among the public:

Plans to renationalise the railways;
Freeze the retirement age;
Ban zero hours contracts;
Increase taxes on the rich;
Build hundreds of thousands of new council homes.
By contrast, Theresa May's plans to axe the ban on fox-hunting and increase the retirement age, received the support of just 12% and 15% of voters respectively.

Of the 13 promises listed in the poll, only Labour's immigration policy was opposed by more people than supported it.

rudatron posted:

Did he legit say that, because lol.

quote:

Tony Blair says he wouldn’t want a left-wing Labour party to win an election
The former PM says he wouldn't take the 'route to victory' if it was left-wing
Jon Stone @joncstone Wednesday 22 July 2015 10:31 BST

Tony Blair has said he would not want a left-wing Labour party to win a general election.

The former prime minister said that even if he thought a left-wing programme was the route to victory, he would not adopt one.

“[Labour] misunderstand the difference between radical leftism, which is often in fact quite reactionary – and radical social democracy, which is all about ensuring that values are put to work in the most effective way,” he said.

“Let me make my position clear: I wouldn’t want to win on an old-fashioned leftist platform. Even if I thought it was the route to victory, I wouldn’t take it.”

“Even if you did [win] it wouldn’t be right because it wouldn’t take the country forward, it would take it backwards. That’s why it’s not the right thing to do.”

R. Mute posted:

this is true. the fact of the matter is that the newspaper industry is inherently broken to the point where it doesn't even work in theory. if you accept the premise that a healthy democracy needs a free, varied and versatile press, leaving it in the hand of the free market seems like A Bad Idea.

Peel posted:

stopping campaigning less than a week from the general election is ludicrous in itself

Mainwaring posted:

Technically pm can be in the house of lords so you could drop an emergency life peerage on them I suppose. Realistically any party leader losing their seat is unlikely to have just won an election.

Drunkboxer posted:

they have foreign monarchs and rodents on their money lmao

Vincent Van Goatse posted:

You mean Orion? Earth would be loving irradiated, is where we'd be.

Baloogan posted:

we would be having our first space war right about now

Jose posted:

left wing policies have always polled well

The New Statesman posted:

THE STAGGERS 23 JUNE 2017
Lord Sainsbury pulls funding from Progress and other political causes
The longstanding Labour donor will no longer fund party political causes.

Centrist Labour MPs face a funding gap for their ideas after the longstanding Labour donor Lord Sainsbury announced he will stop financing party political causes.

Sainsbury, who served as a New Labour minister and also donated to the Liberal Democrats, is instead concentrating on charitable causes.

Lord Sainsbury funded the centrist organisation Progress, dubbed the “original Blairite pressure group”, which was founded in mid Nineties and provided the intellectual underpinnings of New Labour.

The former supermarket boss is understood to still fund Policy Network, an international thinktank headed by New Labour veteran Peter Mandelson.

He has also funded the Remain campaign group Britain Stronger in Europe. The latter reinvented itself as Open Britain after the Leave vote, and has campaigned for a softer Brexit. Its supporters include former Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg and Labour's Chuka Umunna, and it now relies on grassroots funding.

Sainsbury said he wished to “hand the baton on to a new generation of donors” who supported progressive politics.

Progress director Richard Angell said: “Progress is extremely grateful to Lord Sainsbury for the funding he has provided for over two decades. We always knew it would not last forever.”

The organisation has raised a third of its funding target from other donors, but is now appealing for financial support from Labour supporters. Its aims include “stopping a hard-left take over” of the Labour party and “renewing the ideas of the centre-left”.

Dreylad posted:

I ought to write up something about what the Canadian Liberal Party nationally and provincially (in Ontario) is doing and has done historically to marginalize left-wing parties - and counteract their own growing unpopularity - by adopting popular left-wing policies at the right moment, but this is very true

quote:

Voters really seemed to respect the integrity and decency of Jeremy Corbyn. Back in 2010, when we lost the election, so many people in party politics found political guidance in the polls. They wanted to know what the British people thought on issues such as, say, immigration; judging by the polls, they would assume that anyone who didn’t take a tough line on that issue couldn’t perform well electorally.

But that’s been turned on its head now. Jeremy has succeeded in breaking through and setting an agenda. On the doorsteps, people were telling me, “Oh, well I don’t quite agree with him on this or that issue, but I’m going to vote for him because he’s decent and honest, and has the right values.” It’s refreshing for politics, and it’s good for parliament.

rudatron posted:

never? the point is that what was once very middle of the road stuff is now being intentionally cast as 'hard left', and impossible and unpragmatic and blah blah blah

Pener Kropoopkin posted:

Jose posted:

https://twitter.com/Jack_Blanchard_...r%3D632%23pti13

Dreylad posted:

yeah, there are definitely parallels with moral purity and transgression then and now. Angela Nagle's book on the alt-right also delves into this subject (and is really good)

The Guardian posted:

Ev'rybody must get stones

Nick Cohen

Sunday 8 December 2002 14.55 GMT

The most accessible entrance into the Blairs' spirit world of paganism, spiritualism, pseudo-science and quackery is through a chat with Cherie's 'homeopathic dowser healer' - one Jack Temple, aged 86. Temple is the possessor of a 'Neolithic stone circle', which, he assured me, captures the healing energies of the stars, sun and moon and holds them for the benefit of his paying customers. He discovered the 'magic' stones in Pembrokeshire and transported them in two lorries to his home in Pyrford, near Woking, Surrey.

'I'm sorry,' I interrupted. 'The local authority and the National Trust allowed you to run off with an ancient stone circle?'

'The stones weren't in a circle,' he explained. 'They had been cleared so the field could be worked. They were dumped in a ditch and a farmer sold them to me.'

'I see. A farmer said a load of old rubble was once a Stone Age religious site and you paid ready money to get your hands on it. How did you know the stones were genuine stones, so to speak?'

An irritated note entered Temple's voice. 'I dowsed them with my magic pendulum, of course. I made the amazing discovery that each of the 16 stones relieved stress in different parts of the body - the muscles, the brain and so on.' After he moved the stones to Surrey, Temple went to the garden centre and used his pendulum to divine the aura of the herb and alpines section. The trial of the plants was merciless. He found only wild strawberries had the strength to 'contain nature's energy generated by the stone circle'.

Temple duly planted his circle with strawberries. He will sell you a small packet of their dried leaves for £10 (plus £1 p&p). It's a bargain, as Cherie Blair knows. Temple said in his autobiography Medicine Man : 'I believe I've helped the lame to walk, the barren to conceive, and the sad to smile. I've been able to reflate the lungs of children previously condemned to a life constricted by asthma. I've even seen the bald pates of middle-aged and elderly men begin to spring hair growth again.'

Don't mock him. Fergie and, inevitably, the late Princess Di have acclaimed him as a healing genius. Temple is happy to allow everyone to share the inner harmony of royalty and the Blairs. For £85 he will sell you a pile of stones and instructions on how to lay them out in the garden. (This time he doesn't mention the cost of the post and packing, which I suspect will be steep.)

Cherie Blair was introduced to the doddering dowser by Sylvia and Carole Caplin. Sylvia, 67, is a former ballet dancer turned spiritualist. On 11 November, the Daily Mail published an extraordinary piece. According to a former client, Caplin Senior 'can bring the light down' and open channels with the dead. Mrs Blair regularly visits the mystic's £500,000 house in a gated park in Dorking. It, too, is filled with stones. 'There was a particularly active period in the summer when Sylvia was channelling for Cherie over two or three times a week, with almost daily contact between them,' the Mail reported. 'There were times when Cherie's faxes ran to 10 pages.'

This can't possibly be true, I thought. I phoned Downing Street and asked if they denied the story. The press officer promised to call back, but never did. I checked if the Mail had received a complaint. The paper hadn't heard a squeak of protest. I think we can take the silence as a confirmation.

Caplin's daughter is the former soft-porn model who became Mrs and Mr Blair's style guru and confidante in 1994. She has been a lady in waiting at the New Labour court since. Her boyfriend is Peter Foster, an Australian fraudster with a criminal record that goes back to 1983. After a week of stupendous lies, the Blairs admitted Foster had somehow secured them two flats in Bristol at £69,000 off the market price - or about three times the annual pay of a fire officer.

The mother is as alarming as her daughter's crooked lover. Cherie evidently believes Caplin senior is in touch with the other side, and Caplin may well believe she can natter with the dead herself. None of her clients has suggested she played on their fear and credulity. But, so what? Whether she is a sincere fool or a sly fraud doesn't matter. A con's a con whatever the mental state of the con woman. What spiritualists say is a lie whether they know it or not.

Modern spiritualism began in 1848 when two sisters from New York State announced that they had received coded tapping messages from the ghost of a murdered peddler. The scam was a great success. For 40 years Margaret and Katherine Fox made a good living from a fraud which inspired mediums the world over. At the end of their lives the Foxes admitted that the knocking sounds seance-goers had heard were made by Margaret - who had mastered the knack of snapping her toes. Their belated honesty did no good and spiritualism continued to flourish.

Given its history, why does Cherie believe it? Well she is a Catholic and her husband is an Anglo-Catholic, and if you can believe that wine and a wafer are the blood and body of Christ you can believe anything. Or, indeed, everything. Until now, there has been an averting of well-bred eyes from the superstitions of our creepy PM and his gullible wife.

A year ago, the Times printed the following account of what they did on their summer holidays at the luxurious Maroma Hotel on Mexico's Caribbean coast. The Blairs visited a 'Temazcal', a steam bath enclosed in a brick pyramid. It was dusk and they had stripped down to their swimming costumes. Inside, they met Nancy Aguilar, a new-age therapist. She told them that the pyramid was a Mayan womb in which they would be reborn. The Blairs saw the shapes of animals in the steam and experienced 'inner-feelings and visions'. They smeared each other with melon, papaya and mud from the jungle, and then let out a primal scream of purifying agony. No one followed-up the Times's scoop - deference is not as dead as some people would have you think.

When the Blairs moved into Downing Street, a feng shui expert rearranged the furniture at Number 10. Cherie wears a 'magic pendant' known as the BioElectric Shield, which is filled with 'a matrix of specially cut quartz crystals' that surround the wearer with 'a cocoon of energy' and ward off evil forces. (It was given to her by Hillary Clinton, another political spouse who combines the characteristic Third Way vices of sharp prac tice and bone-headedness.) Then there have been inflatable Flowtron trousers, auricular therapy and acupuncture pins in the ear.

New Age Labour has spilled out of Downing Street and blighted public policy. In January 1999, for instance, the Government recruited a feng shui consultant, Renuka Wickmaratne, to discover a magical way to improve inner-city estates without raising taxes.

'Red and orange flowers would reduce crime,' she concluded, 'and introducing a water feature would reduce poverty. I was brought up with this ancient knowledge.' Three years later the Government announced that, for the first time since the creation of the NHS, 'alternative' remedies could be granted the same status as conventional treatments, despite the absence of evidence that they might cure the sick. According to the Sunday Times, 'The inclusion of Indian ayurvedic medicine, a preventative approach to healing using diet, yoga and meditation, is thought to have been influenced by Cherie Blair's interest in alternative therapy.'

The Blairs' interest, along with that of Di and Fergie (in mystics as well as allegedly neolithic circles), of Prince Phillip (a subscriber to Flying Saucer Review since the magazine began publication in the mid-1950s) and of Margaret Thatcher (in electro-shock bath therapy), show that superstition isn't always the preserve of the hopeless poor. It can appeal to the feeble-minded everywhere, from the 'anarcho-primitives' of the anti-capitalist movement to the supposedly tough Tories who turn from the exposés of the Blairs at the front of the Mail to friendly discussions of how the Bible Code predicted whatever happened last week at the back.

Nothing worth having can come from their babblings, and not only because 10 Downing Street is beginning to look like a tsar's court filled with shamans and holy-rolling petty criminals.

At the heart of New Age crankiness is a deep selfishness. The treatments favoured by the Blairs and so many from their natural constituency in the upper-middle class promise to release the true self, heal the abused self, pamper the stressed self and reassure the doubting self that deep down inside there is good. Others don't get a look in.

The only possible benefit is that at least I will stop hearing Labour MPs saying that Cherie will keep Tony's feet on the ground and make him stick to socialist principles. What's left of the Labour movement is going to have to face the weirdness of its leading couple without illusion and, I hope, purify itself by colonically irrigating the Blairs out of the system.

Fallen Hamprince posted:

the titles like 'viscount' and 'baron' make these people sound like the scions of ancient noble houses but in reality they're almost the (great)-grandchildren of upjumped business moguls. the first viscount rothermere was a newspaper baron who got rich and connected enough to become a real baron before being promoted to viscount. he was also, appropriately enough for the mail, a nazi

Jose posted:

Turn on your monitor

JFairfax posted:

he was a catholic mate, and he got to live the dream of starting a crusade in the middle east

The Guardian posted:

Ev'rybody must get stones

Nick Cohen

Sunday 8 December 2002 14.55 GMT

The most accessible entrance into the Blairs' spirit world of paganism, spiritualism, pseudo-science and quackery is through a chat with Cherie's 'homeopathic dowser healer' - one Jack Temple, aged 86. Temple is the possessor of a 'Neolithic stone circle', which, he assured me, captures the healing energies of the stars, sun and moon and holds them for the benefit of his paying customers. He discovered the 'magic' stones in Pembrokeshire and transported them in two lorries to his home in Pyrford, near Woking, Surrey.

'I'm sorry,' I interrupted. 'The local authority and the National Trust allowed you to run off with an ancient stone circle?'

'The stones weren't in a circle,' he explained. 'They had been cleared so the field could be worked. They were dumped in a ditch and a farmer sold them to me.'

'I see. A farmer said a load of old rubble was once a Stone Age religious site and you paid ready money to get your hands on it. How did you know the stones were genuine stones, so to speak?'

An irritated note entered Temple's voice. 'I dowsed them with my magic pendulum, of course. I made the amazing discovery that each of the 16 stones relieved stress in different parts of the body - the muscles, the brain and so on.' After he moved the stones to Surrey, Temple went to the garden centre and used his pendulum to divine the aura of the herb and alpines section. The trial of the plants was merciless. He found only wild strawberries had the strength to 'contain nature's energy generated by the stone circle'.

Temple duly planted his circle with strawberries. He will sell you a small packet of their dried leaves for £10 (plus £1 p&p). It's a bargain, as Cherie Blair knows. Temple said in his autobiography Medicine Man : 'I believe I've helped the lame to walk, the barren to conceive, and the sad to smile. I've been able to reflate the lungs of children previously condemned to a life constricted by asthma. I've even seen the bald pates of middle-aged and elderly men begin to spring hair growth again.'

Don't mock him. Fergie and, inevitably, the late Princess Di have acclaimed him as a healing genius. Temple is happy to allow everyone to share the inner harmony of royalty and the Blairs. For £85 he will sell you a pile of stones and instructions on how to lay them out in the garden. (This time he doesn't mention the cost of the post and packing, which I suspect will be steep.)

Cherie Blair was introduced to the doddering dowser by Sylvia and Carole Caplin. Sylvia, 67, is a former ballet dancer turned spiritualist. On 11 November, the Daily Mail published an extraordinary piece. According to a former client, Caplin Senior 'can bring the light down' and open channels with the dead. Mrs Blair regularly visits the mystic's £500,000 house in a gated park in Dorking. It, too, is filled with stones. 'There was a particularly active period in the summer when Sylvia was channelling for Cherie over two or three times a week, with almost daily contact between them,' the Mail reported. 'There were times when Cherie's faxes ran to 10 pages.'

This can't possibly be true, I thought. I phoned Downing Street and asked if they denied the story. The press officer promised to call back, but never did. I checked if the Mail had received a complaint. The paper hadn't heard a squeak of protest. I think we can take the silence as a confirmation.

Caplin's daughter is the former soft-porn model who became Mrs and Mr Blair's style guru and confidante in 1994. She has been a lady in waiting at the New Labour court since. Her boyfriend is Peter Foster, an Australian fraudster with a criminal record that goes back to 1983. After a week of stupendous lies, the Blairs admitted Foster had somehow secured them two flats in Bristol at £69,000 off the market price - or about three times the annual pay of a fire officer.

The mother is as alarming as her daughter's crooked lover. Cherie evidently believes Caplin senior is in touch with the other side, and Caplin may well believe she can natter with the dead herself. None of her clients has suggested she played on their fear and credulity. But, so what? Whether she is a sincere fool or a sly fraud doesn't matter. A con's a con whatever the mental state of the con woman. What spiritualists say is a lie whether they know it or not.

Modern spiritualism began in 1848 when two sisters from New York State announced that they had received coded tapping messages from the ghost of a murdered peddler. The scam was a great success. For 40 years Margaret and Katherine Fox made a good living from a fraud which inspired mediums the world over. At the end of their lives the Foxes admitted that the knocking sounds seance-goers had heard were made by Margaret - who had mastered the knack of snapping her toes. Their belated honesty did no good and spiritualism continued to flourish.

Given its history, why does Cherie believe it? Well she is a Catholic and her husband is an Anglo-Catholic, and if you can believe that wine and a wafer are the blood and body of Christ you can believe anything. Or, indeed, everything. Until now, there has been an averting of well-bred eyes from the superstitions of our creepy PM and his gullible wife.

A year ago, the Times printed the following account of what they did on their summer holidays at the luxurious Maroma Hotel on Mexico's Caribbean coast. The Blairs visited a 'Temazcal', a steam bath enclosed in a brick pyramid. It was dusk and they had stripped down to their swimming costumes. Inside, they met Nancy Aguilar, a new-age therapist. She told them that the pyramid was a Mayan womb in which they would be reborn. The Blairs saw the shapes of animals in the steam and experienced 'inner-feelings and visions'. They smeared each other with melon, papaya and mud from the jungle, and then let out a primal scream of purifying agony. No one followed-up the Times's scoop - deference is not as dead as some people would have you think.

When the Blairs moved into Downing Street, a feng shui expert rearranged the furniture at Number 10. Cherie wears a 'magic pendant' known as the BioElectric Shield, which is filled with 'a matrix of specially cut quartz crystals' that surround the wearer with 'a cocoon of energy' and ward off evil forces. (It was given to her by Hillary Clinton, another political spouse who combines the characteristic Third Way vices of sharp prac tice and bone-headedness.) Then there have been inflatable Flowtron trousers, auricular therapy and acupuncture pins in the ear.

New Age Labour has spilled out of Downing Street and blighted public policy. In January 1999, for instance, the Government recruited a feng shui consultant, Renuka Wickmaratne, to discover a magical way to improve inner-city estates without raising taxes.

'Red and orange flowers would reduce crime,' she concluded, 'and introducing a water feature would reduce poverty. I was brought up with this ancient knowledge.' Three years later the Government announced that, for the first time since the creation of the NHS, 'alternative' remedies could be granted the same status as conventional treatments, despite the absence of evidence that they might cure the sick. According to the Sunday Times, 'The inclusion of Indian ayurvedic medicine, a preventative approach to healing using diet, yoga and meditation, is thought to have been influenced by Cherie Blair's interest in alternative therapy.'

The Blairs' interest, along with that of Di and Fergie (in mystics as well as allegedly neolithic circles), of Prince Phillip (a subscriber to Flying Saucer Review since the magazine began publication in the mid-1950s) and of Margaret Thatcher (in electro-shock bath therapy), show that superstition isn't always the preserve of the hopeless poor. It can appeal to the feeble-minded everywhere, from the 'anarcho-primitives' of the anti-capitalist movement to the supposedly tough Tories who turn from the exposés of the Blairs at the front of the Mail to friendly discussions of how the Bible Code predicted whatever happened last week at the back.

Nothing worth having can come from their babblings, and not only because 10 Downing Street is beginning to look like a tsar's court filled with shamans and holy-rolling petty criminals.

At the heart of New Age crankiness is a deep selfishness. The treatments favoured by the Blairs and so many from their natural constituency in the upper-middle class promise to release the true self, heal the abused self, pamper the stressed self and reassure the doubting self that deep down inside there is good. Others don't get a look in.

The only possible benefit is that at least I will stop hearing Labour MPs saying that Cherie will keep Tony's feet on the ground and make him stick to socialist principles. What's left of the Labour movement is going to have to face the weirdness of its leading couple without illusion and, I hope, purify itself by colonically irrigating the Blairs out of the system.