I am delighted to share the cover for my book 'The Rage of Party: How Whig Versus Tory Made Modern Britain', out next year and available to pre-order here:

No government takes a blind bit of notice of the views of the voters anyway, so at this point you could enfranchise golden retrievers, the population of Belgium and 2 year olds and the state would still carry on with the same policies.

I oppose votes for 16/17 year olds, but let's be honest, the impact probably won't be much. Most will be too bored or busy staring at screens to bother to vote. Mainly it just adds a few million more to the ranks of an apathetic & disillusioned electorate.

A final point: in contrast to my argument in this thread people often invoke Tom Paine. But Paine and his subsequent followers (e.g. Carlile) were actually deeply untypical of wider English radicalism & had much less influence than many like to suppose.

Oh, and also please, please drop the Suffragette stuff. It's comically misleading. Most of the leading Suffragettes were mad authoritarians (who ended up as Tories, cranks or fascists) & they set back the cause they advocated by their quasi-terrorist tactics.

So please spare me the 'progressive patriot' Tony Benn line (which made more sense for Tony Benn himself, who was, for all his faults, an authentic product of a distinctively English radical tradition). It is a very ill-fitting garment for what the 'left' has now become.

It certainly doesn't have much to do with the Diggers, Levellers, Chartists or indeed the trade union movement, which was highly socially and culturally conservative and deeply shaped by the national culture it grew up in (& was accordingly pragmatic & patriotic).

The contemporary British left does have some native antecedents. The statist technocracy of the Fabians clearly still lives on. There were fringe bohemian Victorian socialists of the Edward Carpenter variety. But largely it's a melange of foreign influences, usually American.

The genealogy has some (albeit often anachronistic) validity when seen in terms of a) economic/material questions and b) the fight for a more democratic constitution. But the contemporary left tends to downplay economics & prefers rule by judges to majority rule.

They were usually not at all socially or culturally radical. On questions of e.g. sexuality, personal behaviour etc, they were highly conservative. They usually also had an historicising temper, mostly presenting their reforms as the revival of an 'ancient constitution' etc.

Radical movements and then socialism in Europe were strongly marked by their atheistic, anti-clerical temper: not so in England where, although not infrequently hostile to the Church of England, they were almost always deeply Christian.

The irony of the classic genealogy of English leftism (Diggers, Levellers, Chartists etc) is that even if you accept it, in all its anachronistic silliness, it makes little sense for a left that's now a) highly secular & b) largely characterised by cultural progressivism.

Yes, in his radical phase he did advocate a sort of primitive agrarian communism. But largely by reference to the Acts of the Apostles and the Old Testament. Proto-Marxist he was not.

Also little noted is that later in his life Winstanley inherited property and became a respectable churchwarden and, ironically, 'overseer of the poor'. Religiously he basically became a quietist Quaker and gave up radical politics. Amazing what a good inheritance will do.

I'd love to take these people back to St George's Hill in 1649 and let them have a conversation with Gerrard Winstanley. I think a five minute conversation about his views on the Second Coming and his spiritual visions might give them pause.

Let a load of backbench MPs dictate to you and stymie your policy agenda, then ages later suspend a handful of them for being bolshy. Yeah, that'll learn them Sir Keir. You slam that stable door shut months after the horse has bolted.

RT @sjblakemore: I was explaining to my Ukrainian colleague the phrase ‘There’s no such thing as a free lunch’. She told me the equivalent….

Our incompetent establishment (politicians, civil servants, quangocrats etc) have no intention of setting the precedent of 'being rubbish at your job and making a huge cock-up has consequences, like being sacked'. None of their jobs would be safe.

Doesn't take a genius to see a class angle here. 18 year old working class lad being v twitchy in troubles-era Belfast and shooting someone in a confused melee: establishment empathy = 0. Middle class lanyard-bedecked public sector manager cocks up: establishment empathy = 100%.

Funny how accountability for past mistakes applies to British squaddies being shot at by Provos in the 70s but not to civil servants making a gargantuan cock up costing the state at least hundreds of millions, maybe up to £7bn.

*flow through.