Turncoats
I
have known
_________

Earlier today grimmerupnorth (Councillor Susan Press) had a promising contribution, posted at 05:26.

Malcolm now gratefully, even gleefully borrows his header therefrom.

The piece is still credited at bloggers4labour:

TURNCOATS I HAVE KNOWN - PART 1

In my very much younger days I was ( for a brief time) a member of Beckenham Labour Party. Not the most leftie of areas. But the Labour Party had some nice people. One of whom was NOT the London Labour MP Reg Race. Known as a firebrand left-winger, he served as MP for the north London cons...

Of this item, the grimmerupnorth blogspot now evidences nary a trace.

Similarly, grimmerupnorth ran a header Death of a racist (don't believe Malcolm: check the link), before another crisis of conscience changed that to "Manning shuffles off the stage".

Now, come on!

Both of grimmerupnorth's targets came over to Malcolm as deeply unpleasant men. Manning certainly deserves none of Diogenes Laertius' de mortuis nil nisi bonum dicendum est crap. Enough already: others will have it in for Manning. The keyboards are already dripping with justified bile, phlegm and sputum.

But Race. Pass the sick bag, Alice.

Race served his time as a parliamentary candidate in Ruislip-Northwood in both 1974 elections. Then he was adopted for Wood Green, which he took in 1979. When Wood Green was conflated with Hornsey, Race was out of a job. He offered his services to Sedgefield Labour Party for the 1983 candidature, but that CLP chose a better man, a young, thrusting barrister. In 2001 Race blew the nomination for Chesterfield, after Tony Benn's retirement, spectacularly on the wrong end of an 8½% swing.

While he was esconced in Wood Green, the Haringey Labour Group was riven between decent Labourites (hence Malcolm's personal point of interest) and the loonies. The loonies were a clique, a cadre, a party-within-a-party, dragooned by Jeremy Corbyn. This lot were so into comradely solidarity they held pre-Labour Group meetings on Sunday evening, in the Middle Lane Labour Party office, to learn their hymn-sheets. Race was allegedly a regular attender. A significant element in the Corbyn faction were infiltrators from the IMG.

"Doctor" Race (he has a Phud from the University of Kent) is a master of the English language. He forwarded the discipline and polysyllabic vocabulary of sociology with his thesis Political agents and the development of bureaucraticisation and deradicalisation in the British Labour Party. Indeed.

He is also credited with being the first MP recorded using "fuck" in parliamentary debate.

But what, Malcolm wondered, provoked grimmerupnorth's (now deleted and therefore hypothetical) piece? Could it, perchance, be Robert Watts in the Sunday Telegraph? This suggests a significant hypocrisy in "Doctor" Race, who once:

criticised Conservative MPs for profiting by the sell-off of the state-owned energy company Amersham International, alleging that one Tory had made a "killing" from the deal.

Now, however,

he has amassed a fortune working as a private contractor for the National Health Service...
Mr Race's company, Quality Health, is one of a select band of "approved contractors" that health trusts must hire to conduct patient and staff surveys...
Quality Health, which Mr Race owns with his wife, Amanda Moore, has won contracts with 320 of the 487 NHS trusts across the UK. The company charges about £4,200 to complete each annual survey.
... the success of Quality Health has allowed Mr Race to establish a palatial home at Sutton Manor in the Derbyshire village of Sutton Scarsdale, near Chesterfield.

Ah, yes, perhaps so. So here's one for the hymn-sheet: Matthew 7, 15-18—

Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.
Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?
Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit.
A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit.

Sphere: Related Content