What Is "Gentrification"? Ask Diane Abbott, MP

It's heartening to know that propective Labour leader, hard left loon Diane Abbott, believed as early as 1987, when she was the newly elected MP for Hackney, that the Tories were responsible for what she curiously branded the "gentrification" of London.

Now, we all know that what she really means by "gentrification" is the migration of wealth from traditionally affluent areas of the capital, like Chelsea and Westminster, to what were then traditional Labour slag heaps often resembing demilitarised zones, like Battersea and Docklands. It's no accident, for instance, that Kubrick, for his classic war movie Full Metal Jacket, deemed the latter wasteland as the perfect filming location for that movie's desolate battle scenes throughout 1986 - just before the evil Tories began to, er, "gentrify" it, I guess.

It's also no accident, at least to me, that Abbott's constituency, which she has now been protecting vigilantly from gentrification for 23 years, is still an absolute sh*thole where no one in their right mind would dare, never mind want, to live. And that's just the way she likes it. But why? It's pretty obvious really.

People like her, namely corrupt, hypocritical chardonnay socialists (and I do not care one jot what she pretends her background was, that's what she became a long, long time ago) always preach one thing and practise another. In her case, no matter what she might say to the contrary, she's perfectly comfortable with the misery and poverty her brand of political ideology not only fails to alleviate, (regardless of what they laughably say about wanting to do just that), it actually entrenches it and makes it worse. Look around you. Look at the vast, socialist-built housing estates and tower blocks in virtually every inner city in the land, most of which have been under Labour control for decades, and you will see deprivation unchallenged, crime unpunished, immigration uncontrolled, children uneducated and mothers unmarried. Everywhere.

So for Diane Abbott to talk, as she does in this early interview, about schools being "damaged" across London by the then Conservative government's attempts to break what was already back then a desperate cycle of despair and ignorance begun in the post-war world by socialists just like her, is simply an insult to reason and an affront to common decency. She sends her child to a private school for God's sake. However she might try to hide behind her gender, pathetically, as she did in a radio interview yesterday afternoon, that is a fact and it smacks of the rankest of a rank hypocrisy, something which is, sadly, indicative of her type.

I do remember how she attempted to justify this on This Week some years ago, moaning when challenged that the local schools in her constituency, (with a Labour dominated LEA in a socialist-dominated sector, naturally), weren't "good enough" for her son. I also remember how Starkey, that annoying historian, memorably slapped her down by saying that if it wasn't good enough for her child, it wasn't good enough for anyone's. Hear hear.

But I digress. The simple point is that putting the hypocrite Abbott's strange complaint, born as it is of nugatory, familiar, fake class warrior mendacity, to one side for a moment, this Tory government needs to press on with urgent zeal and reboot this "gentrification" of not just London's remaining Labour fortresses of futility, but the whole of the United Kingdom's - everywhere (and I don't mean with a Brown-style catastrophic property boom and bust). It means fighting entrenched Labour corruption and double standards, which Abbott perfectly personifies, everywhere and ruthlessly. This time, the Tories should be playing for keeps.

That there's an outside chance Abbott will be leader of a dying Labour party when that process is well and truly underway fills me with glee. The elegant irony of the arrangement would be priceless.

Oh, and in case any socialists out there are still confused enough not to understand what I'm saying, I'll spell it out for you: for "gentrification" read success, growth, social regeneration, aspiration and, of course, liberty - something that everyone deserves to be part of, and which is at least possible under a Conservative government, but completely impossible under a socialist one, as the last thirteen years have just proved with such terrible, terrible consequences. Get it now?

Enough said.

(Isn't John Stapleton good, by the way?)

A World Not Really Developing

I have a huge amount of respect for Fred Harrison, regardless of what I suspect might be his political proclivities. He's a man of integrity, wisdom and intellectual authority - which is probably why he characterises himself as a "renegade economist".

He's so good, he saw the British property crash coming long before it happened - but no one in government listened to him, of course, so he certainly has no love for Brown. We have at least that in common.

Well, he's on special form with this truly chilling analysis of the current state of play in some of the southern African nations. South Africa, as I'd suspected, is (as Harrison says) a 'timebomb'. If South Africa goes the way of Zimbabwe, the socio-economic shock it will cause the world will be simply massive.