Labour’s Gaza problem

The district of Pendle in Lancashire has a long history of dissenters, nonconformists, witches and murderers. Perhaps because it is so sodden and bleak and northern: life is nothing but an impoverished struggle against everything, accompanied by the occasional maniacal cry of the curlew and the demented smoke-alarm call of the lapwing. The Pendle Witch Trials of 1612 are famous and many locals have campaigned to have the seven women and two men who were hanged posthumously pardoned. I don’t know if they were witches, but they certainly sounded hugely irritating – especially Alice Nutter, who lived up to her name.

It is sometimes argued that we shouldn’t hang people simply because they are irritating, but with each year that passes I find myself more and more at odds with that point of view. Anyway, the area boomed for a while when the looms were spinning away but is now broke and just a little bit squalid. Pendle has the highest rate of any local authority for child poverty in the country – 43 per cent. The principal town, Nelson – dowdy, windswept, boarded-up – makes Hartlepool resemble Monaco. The soaked, flat-topped, lowish Pennines envelop the area, providing a suitably isolated place for the locals to indulge in their strange hobbies of witchcraft and murder. Asians from India and Pakistan arrived in Pendle postwar to work in the mills, and Nelson is 52 per cent Muslim. For Pendle, the figure is 27 per cent.

Last week the psephologist Sir John Curtice predicted that Labour was 99 per cent certain to win the next general election. I don’t doubt that Labour is more likely to win, but I think that Sir John should spend a night or two in Nelson to see some of the problems which Labour is busy storing
up for itself.