Best to face facts, as a rule
AMONG the Question Time panellists last week was Emily Thornberry. I imagine that Conservatives offer up regular prayers that Thornberry succeeds Corbyn as Labour leader, and so are disappointed that she is struggling to gain sufficient support to go much further in the contest.
Her diagnosis for the party’s defeat was that it should have ducked the election and insisted instead on a second EU referendum. Never mind that the election was effectively a second referendum – and its outcome a consequence of politicians like Thornberry seeking to cancel the first one.
A couple of nights previously, Thornberry also popped up on Andrew Neil’s BBC show. She bore an air of resentment about having to put herself through it, and while being scrutinised by the old inquisitor is understandably no politician’s idea of fun, the distinct impression given was of someone who expects to be taken at her own estimate rather than questioned.
Hence the particular splutter of indignation when
Neil pointed out that despite Thornberry favouring comprehensive schools for everyone else’s children, she sent her own to a partially selective one. She’s hardly alone – the previously mentioned Diane Abbott and Shadow Attorney General Shami Chakrabarti sent their sons to private schools, too. But then, there’s always a special set of circumstances about why the same rules they want to see imposed on others don’t apply to them.
WE visited the National Coal Mining Museum, in the former Caphouse Colliery near Wakefield, West Yorkshire last week.
I highly recommend it, especially for the 450ft-trip underground conducted by an ex-miner as guide.
While it cannot convey the hardship of working down there, it fills you with awe and respect for anyone who did so. The museum is
a reminder of the tough and distinctive character of coalfield communities, and why they held out for as long as they did during the 1984-85 miners’ strike.
And it makes you marvel anew at the chasm now existing between those people and the party founded to represent the working man and woman – so wide that many of them now have Tory MPs. Though obviously that’s because they’ve been brainwashed.