One of those very unlikely posts where I defend the Labour Party

Question Time last night – as is customary the Labour Party representative took a trashing from... Well... everybody really.

Last night’s Aunt Sally was Peter Hain and yes, he took it, on everything from the Iraq War to Fred Goodwin’s pension. Whenever someone was laying into him and the camera flashed to his face there seemed to be a look of bafflement in his eyes: “I’m sure when I was an anti-apartheid activist I was one of the good guys...”.

To be honest this is always going to happen to the party in power, Hain has done some pretty shitty things (he once told me in a Q&A at a conference in the run up to Iraq that we would be “naive to think Saddam Hussein didn’t have weapons of mass destruction”) and yes - the Labour Party deserves it for various things (Iraq, stealth privatisation, not giving a toss about trade unions). But let’s not pretend it would be better under the Tories.

The most irritating thing was everyone else at the table using “Fred the Shred’s” ridiculous pension for political point scoring off Hain. Whilst they kept asking him why, if the government had bailed out RBS, was this charlatan benefiting from taxpayers money he kept saying he was “baffled” by the whole thing, giving the impression of a batty old aunt suffering from Alzheimer’s who hadn’t heard the question properly.

It’s very easy to throw rotten fruit at the people who have to take out the trash. As an audience member said, what Goodwin is doing is morally abhorrent but not illegal and thus Hain, or anybody else, has very little power to stop it at this point. People don’t seem to understand that the international capitalist system, particularly the finance sector, has for at least the last decade been stronger than any democratically elected government. The realpolitik of the situation is that those fucking bankers had everything sewn up. That may have changed recently. The important thing is to make sure it never happens again.

Unfortunately it NOT happening again won’t grab any headlines or win any votes. Because no one will notice something not happening. If you know what I mean.

Oh, bugger it... NEXT!