Demonstrably

Demonstrations in Iran and China are cheered on by the people who have made them illegal in Britain, by the people who have no intention of making them legal again in Britain, and by the people who have consciously chosen not to report those sorry facts.

China's heavy lockdown policy is regarded as a legitimate cause for protest, but Australia's heavy lockdown policy was not. Anti-lockdown protests in China, although tiny for the size of the country and of the cities in question, are given saturation coverage in Britain, where large anti-lockdown protests were repeatedly ignored by media on whose doorsteps they were being held.

The globally unparalleled repressiveness of the Chinese Communist Party is presented as manifest in its increasing moves towards the relaxation of Zero Covid, as sought by those who had felt the jackboot on their necks by being allowed to demonstrate noisily and in front of international media hostile to the regime.

And Xi Jinping is obviously on the way out, because that is the view of everyone who has been saying the same thing about Vladimir Putin, Bashar al-Assad, Nicolás Maduro, and a dozen others, for years on end.

Still, at least the British State has bought out the stake that the Chinese or any other foreign State should never have held in Sizewell C. There are rather a lot of other things that, for the sake of national security, also need to be brought back into public ownership. Just do not expect that case to be made by the Labour Party.

We are heading for a hung Parliament. To strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty, we need to hold the balance of power. Owing nothing to either main party, we must be open to the better offer. There does, however, need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not.

A World To Win

My trade union, Unite, is engaged in strike-busting activity at the Royal Mail. In February, the General Secretary, Sharon Graham, declared that "the remaining financial relationship with the Labour Party is now under review" because of the Coventry bin strike, yet nothing has come of that while Keir Starmer's Labour has become more and more anti-union. The talks that some unions are now having with the Government would be unthinkable if Starmer were Prime Minister.

And Unite remains affiliated to the ILGA, which ungrammatically calls for action to, "Eliminate all laws and policies that punish or criminalise same-sex intimacy, gender affirmation, abortion, HIV transmission non-disclosure and exposure, or that limit the exercise of bodily autonomy, including laws limiting legal capacity of adolescents, people with disabilities or other groups to provide consent to sex or sexual and reproductive health services or laws authorising non-consensual abortion, sterilisation, or contraceptive use." The World Health Organisation defines adolescents as those aged between 10 and 19 years. This is a call to lower the age of consent to 10.

Therefore, I am in principle still a candidate for General Secretary of Unite the Union in 2026. Join Unite Community here.

Opening Our Reach

The dispute with BT and Openreach has been resolved. Strikes work. Over in the officially public sector, although obviously you cannot imagine the State allowing BT or Openreach to go under, subsidies are greater than would be necessary to avoid the strikes altogether. Essentially, that is a slush fund. How much of it winds up in the coffers of the political parties? Yes, all of them.

The public sector could be given an inflation-matching pay increase if capital gains tax were equalised with income tax, but the only thing even less likely than that would be the abolition of the exemption of main residences from CGT. I have never understood it, but I am neither an academic nor a newspaper columnist. I am a political activist and a parliamentary candidate, and I have to pick my fights.

As for VAT on school fees, that is the Labour Party's perennial internal crowdpleaser, the unfulfilled promise of which will always be too useful for when activists started to ask what their party was actually for. It is never going to happen. But for the sake of argument, as with so many things, the claims made for and against it are equally contemptible.

Fees have gone up every year forever, but pupil numbers have remained constant. No one who could find £20,000 would struggle to find £24,000, never mind the suggestion that people who could find £30,000 would struggle to find £36,000. No one is struggling already to find that sort of money; you either have it, or you do not.

If a Labour Government were to tax private schools into oblivion in Britain, not that it ever would, then they would set up abroad as if nothing had happened. In any case, it was Michael Gove who in 2017 proposed putting VAT on school fees, and that year's Conservative manifesto threatened in black and white to do so unless at least the major public schools sponsored academies.

There is a class war being waged in British politics, and it is the same one as it always is, the one of "tough decisions" that are always essentially the same ones, both in themselves and no matter who is in office. This most right-wing Government since the War faces the Loony Right on three fronts. The SNP is toying with charging to use the NHS, as the Conservatives are with charging £50 to see the doctor. The Liberal Democrats' departure from government led to a moderation of austerity, and since then there has been nothing like either the invasion of Libya, or Vince Cable's privatisation of the Royal Mail.

As for the Labour Party, it promised even more austerity in 2010 than the Coalition ended up delivering, and it did not oppose the austerity programme in 2015. Most Labour MPs and all Labour Party staffers remained fanatically pro-austerity even after the Government had changed direction, and that has never ceased to be the case, firmly continuous with every Labour Budget from December 1976 onwards.

Having opportunistically pretended to have opposed the only mini-Budget measure that had not been in Liz Truss's pitch to the Conservative membership, the abolition of the 45p rate of income tax, Labour is stuck with its support for all of the others. If you still think that Trussonomics was a good idea, then vote Labour. It has accepted the existence of a "fiscal black hole" of £55 billion, which is a figure made up out of thin air in order to justify predetermined policies.

Therefore, Labour accepts both of Jeremy Hunt's fiscal rules, that underlying debt must be falling as a proportion of GDP at the end of a five-year rolling period, and that public sector borrowing over the same period must be below three per cent of GDP, rules that are not coincidentally reminiscent of those of the eurozone, where they were suspended during the pandemic but are due to be reactivated from the end of 2023. Labour will certainly go into the next General Election with a commitment to adhere to whatever departmental spending limits it had inherited. Of course Labour would not abolish non-domicile tax status, the defenders of which cannot explain where its beneficiaries would go, since it exists nowhere else on Earth.

We are heading for a hung Parliament. To strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty, we need to hold the balance of power. Owing nothing to either main party, we must be open to the better offer. There does, however, need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not.

"Opposing China and Defending Taiwan"?

Those were Tsai Ing-wen's frequent words during the recent election campaign. That was her choice of ground. The voters of Taiwan have given their answer. How often does a President or Prime Minister resign as party leader because of local election results?

Not that we should be misty-eyed about the Kuomintang, which ruled Taiwan as a military dictatorship for 38 years, and a faction of which did originate Taiwanese nationalism. Rejecting the authority of the present Chinese Government to resolve territorial disputes, "the Republic of China" lays claim to most of Mongolia, as well as to parts of Russia, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Bhutan and Myanmar.

Still, the war that was never on is well and truly off for anything like the foreseeable future. Nancy Pelosi is going to have to find an alternative source of income in retirement. Regime change, indeed.

Service à la française, service à la russe

Colonel Abdoulaye Maiga, the Interim Prime Minister of Mali in the military junta that came to power in May 2021, has expelled all non-governmental organisations that were funded or supported by France.

France has never stopped having an empire in Africa, where it fights wars that more than give the lie to lazy jokes about lack of military prowess, and where it maintains two effectively interchangeable currencies across a total of 14 countries with a combined population of 193 million and a combined GDP of $283 billion.

A lot of French blood and treasure goes into all of this, yet France has this month ended all development aid to Mali, three months after it had withdrawn the forces that had spent nine years fighting a major Islamist insurgency that was very much ongoing. In response, Mali has kicked out the French and French-backed NGOs. What is going on?

France asserts that Mali has brought in the Wagner Group, disguised as Russian military instructors. There is every reason to believe that. The voting figures at the United Nations over Ukraine have awoken a sleepy "international community" to the breadth and depth of continuing Russian ties to the old anti-imperial struggles of Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean and the Pacific, supported as those often were by the Soviet Union. Throughout this century, China will also continue to benefit from that legacy of goodwill.

Wagner Group arms and ammunition, up to and including four Mil Mi-17 helicopters, have certainly arrived in Mali. A base has clearly been built near the airport of the capital, Bamako, a city of 2.8 million. The Group has also taken over the former French bases at Gossi, Kidal, Tessalit and Timbuktu. Numbering 400 across the country, those instructors would have to be delivering an awful lot of instruction. Not all of them are Russians. Clashes with jihadists have already killed at least one of them as a matter of official record, although they in turn have already killed at least 200 jihadists.

Africa has been Wagner country for quite some time. The Group provided bodyguards to several candidates in the 2018 Presidential Election in Madagascar, even including the winner who had been favoured by China and the United States, thereby guaranteeing the Russian takeover of Kraoma, Madagascar's national chromite producer. The Wagner Group had also been guarding the chrome mines themselves. Its involvement in Mozambique has been extensive. Its participation in the never-ending Libyan Civil War remains so. Ignore anyone who tells you that that war is over.

More than anywhere else, however, the Wagner Group's African operations have been, and continue to be, in the Central African Republic. Again, that is in the French sphere of influence, although the Group originally went in there, in 2018, to fill the security vacuum that had been left by the French military withdrawal, in 2016, following the loss of three quarters of the country's territory to rebel control. By all accounts, it is guarding the diamond mines in regime-controlled and rebel-controlled areas alike, as it also takes a great interest in the diamonds, gold, uranium, and thus government of Sudan.

There has lately been an operation to take down cryptocurrencies, not that I am any fan of those, after the adoption of Bitcoin as legal tender in the CAR had posed a threat to the CFA franc, itself pegged to the euro and so on. The CAR is a front line in the Great Game as it is being played in the present age. There are anything up to 2000 Wagner Group personnel there, if not more, and it has a firm grip on a number of government institutions, including the General Staff, such that it supervises or directly commands most of the units of the Armed Forces, including at least one EU-trained battalion. Known as Black Russians, hundreds of Centrafricans, former UPC rebels who surrendered, are now fighting for the Wagner Group in Ukraine, or are awaiting deployment there from Russia.

Yevgeny Prigozhin has claimed to a Finnish newspaper that 20 or so Finns were fighting in a British battalion of the Wagner Group, commanded by a former United States Marine Corps general. There are not awfully many former United States Marine Corps generals, so which one do we think that it is, and why? It is rubbish, of course. But just as you can bet your life that there are British and American Nazis fighting on the other side, you can bet your life that there are British and American pure mercenaries in the Wagner Group. We have no interest in whether that or the Kraken Regiment won, just so long as it did not bother us, which it would have no cause to do unless we had been foolish enough to have backed its enemy.

Britain is indeed engaged in such folly, and that on a cross-party basis. But we are heading for a hung Parliament. To strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty, we need to hold the balance of power. Owing nothing to either main party, we must be open to the better offer. There does, however, need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not.

Where The Dragon Really Is

If the diminutive demonstrations in China were any threat to the regime in that gigantic country, then they would already have been suppressed without mercy. Their ephemeral nature is evident from the fact that they are still happening at all. The real story is the emphatic vote of Taiwan for the principle of One China, throwing out the existing puppet of the same CIA that was trying and failing to foment unrest in the cities of the Mainland.

What is Taiwanese nationalism? Just as everyone knows how bad Vladimir Putin is, but that does not alter the Nazi roots and character of Ukrainian nationalism, so the wickedness of Xi Jinping, or indeed the heavy baggage that the Koumintang brings with it, does not alter the fact that Lee Teng-hui always regarded Japanese as his first language and Tokyo as the cultural capital of his wider civilisation.

A volunteer Second Lieutenant in the Imperial Japanese Army until the very end of the Second World War, Lee stood in the same tradition as Park Chung-hee, the dictator of South Korea from 1961 to 1979, who had been an officer in the Japanese Manchukuo Army that had occupied Manchuria. These are the heroic Asian Tigers of successive generations of the same neoliberals who have always lionised Augusto Pinochet. To put it mildly, their economic system neither requires democracy, nor necessarily upholds it.

Japan itself is run by people who believe, “that Japan should be applauded for liberating much of East Asia from Western colonial powers; that the 1946–1948 Tokyo War Crimes tribunals were illegitimate; and that killings by Imperial Japanese troops during the 1937 Nanjing Massacre were exaggerated or fabricated,” as well as that the comfort women were not coerced. The first of those, at least, has been a widespread view in several of those countries at the time and since. Indonesia, as such, is a direct product of it, since the Japanese-backed rulers of the Dutch East Indies simply declared independence under that name at the end of the War. See also Park Chung-hee, and the Lee Teng-hui whose heirs the Taiwanese electorate has just ejected.

The India to which both main parties in Britain are so keen to cosy up is run by the heirs of Mahatma Gandhi’s Nazi-linked assassins, and it has always recognised among the fathers of the nation the likes of Subhas Chandra Bose, who raised an army in support of Japan. He has featured on stamps six times, and on coins three times. Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose International Airport is the aviation hub for the whole of eastern and northeastern India. There is also a Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose Island. Yes, an island. Up to a point, it is understandable that Rishi Sunak might feel some affinity with Narendra Modi. But Keir Starmer has no excuse.

We are heading for a hung Parliament. To strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty, we need to hold the balance of power. Owing nothing to either main party, we must be open to the better offer. There does, however, need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not.

Thirty Years of Hurt

Little Britain started on television seven years after the end of Fantasy Football League. The piggybacking mediocrity David Baddiel had single-handedly brought back blackface, which by the middle of the 1990s had not been seen on British television in a good 10 years.

Baddiel gave blackface an extra decade of life, although that did not include Papa Lazarou, which was an example of an actor playing a blackface performer as Brian Conley had played Al Jolson, but which was not in itself the blackface performance of Baddiel's Jason Lee or of David Walliams's Desiree DeVere.

That is the background to Baddiel's self-appointment, in his late fifties, as a national and even international intellectual guiding light and moral arbiter, clearly positioning himself as the successor to Stephen Fry, former game show host, and author of The Liar and The Hippopotamus. Ceding to these grifters the authority that they imagined for themselves would enthrone blacking up and the favourable depiction of pederasty. Resist.

Shocked And A Bit Excited

Openly calling for the resignation of Xi Jinping is notable and even brave, although I expect that he will survive, and they are not saying who or what they would want instead. But the demonstrations in China are extremely small for the size of the country, or indeed of the cities in question, and they are not especially unusual there.

Yet they could no longer legally happen here. Under the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act, which Labour barely opposed and has no policy of repealing, they could land you in prison for 10 years. Just wait for it to be joined on the Statute Book by the Public Order Bill, which is also being given only the most Official of Opposition.

If you doubted quite how much a part of the Establishment Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil were, then consider that they were not being hauled off to be sentenced to 10-year stretches. Will striking workers be so indulged? Yet strikes are not performative. Even in themselves, without any picketing, they entail a loss of pay. No one submits to that purely to make a point.

The cost of living crisis is nothing new to at least 14.5 million people in Britain, who have been experiencing it unremittingly for 12 years or more, and in some cases for 40. It is news because it has come to affect people are not just expected to be poor and to suck it up. Notice that it is only those suddenly new poor who are ever asked about it. Still, at least it is now being discussed at all.

If, for example, it would take a 19 per cent increase to bring nurses' pay up to the level at which it would have stood if it had kept pace with inflation since 2010, then that is the fault of the people who have been government during that period, a period during which MPs have enjoyed nine increases in pay.

There was no war in Ukraine in 2010. There was no Covid-19. There was no Brexit. Neither the crisis in Ukraine, nor the recent pandemic, has been experienced solely by the United Kingdom. European Union membership has never extended to most of the countries in the world, nor to one third of the countries in the OECD, nor to three quarters of the countries in the G20.

Existing economic problems are being exacerbated by the sanctions against Russia, and by the vast diversion of money and resources to the likes of the Kraken Regiment that it is tellingly now permissible to mention. But the anti-lockdown monomaniacs and the anti-Brexit monomaniacs are mirror images of each other.

For the sake of what they regarded as their natural inferiors, they were once mildly inconvenienced for the first time in their lives, and they are determined to bang on about it until the day they died. Predict that the thing that you disliked would lead to every conceivable form of doom and gloom, and whenever one of those arrived eventually, then you could always claim to have been vindicated. Here we are.

Impoverishment had long been inflicted on many millions of their fellow-citizens by their preferred policies, and not least by the requirements of membership of Margaret Thatcher's Single Market and of the Customs Union, as well as by the support for austerity on the part of the Labour Party until 2015 and again now, most of its MPs and all of its staff continuously, the Liberal Democrats, the SNP, and all parties in Northern Ireland, including the one that was now selling itself as potentially an anti-austerity Government in the Irish Republic.

That impoverishment has been visited on its previous enthusiasts, who still believe that its longstanding victims deserve it, by the chaos that ensued from the mere announcement of an intention to implement the economic programme that had been promised by their favoured candidate for Prime Minister. At 45, the effects will define the background, and often the foreground, of the rest of my life.

None of Jeremy Hunt's measures was being suggested by anyone at the moment that Kwasi Kwarteng stood up to deliver the mini-Budget, when Ukraine was old news, when Covid-19 was very old news, and when Brexit was practically prehistoric. Those measures have nothing to do with anything other than the catastrophic attempt, 40 and more years in the planning, to implement the lunatic economic ideology to which Kwarteng and Liz Truss subscribed.

Blame attaches solely to Kwarteng, to Truss, to the mere one in 13 MPs who ever wanted her to become Prime Minister, to the barely more voters than one parliamentary constituency who gave her the job, to the media outlets who told them what to think, and to the think tanks that told everyone else in this sorry little tale what to think.

Labour at least pretends to believe that there is a "fiscal black hole", because it wants the consequences. It does nothing to challenge Hunt's illiterate assertion that a sovereign state's budget worked like a household budget, and possibly does not even know that that is factually incorrect.

Labour promised even more austerity in 2010 than the Coalition ended up delivering, and it did not oppose the austerity programme in 2015. Most Labour MPs and all Labour Party staffers remained fanatically pro-austerity even after the Government had changed direction, and that has never ceased to be the case, in the spirit of every Labour Budget from December 1976 onwards.

Having opportunistically pretended to have opposed the abolition of the 45p rate of income tax, Labour is stuck with its support for all of the other mini-Budget measures. If you still think that Trussonomics was a good idea, then vote Labour. Like the Lib Dems since their foundation in 1988, Labour since 1995 has been constitutionally committed to all of this. Being purely and simply a vehicle for securing power, the Conservative Party carries no such baggage.

So hope springs eternal. While our media were obsessed with a few hundred bored youths in Beijing and Shanghai, the voters of Taiwan were rejecting the rattlers of other countries' sabres so comprehensively that Tsai Ing-wen has resigned as the Leader of her party. The Kuomintang brings its own issues, but the war that was never on is well and truly off for anything like the foreseeable future. Nancy Pelosi is going to have to find an alternative source of income in retirement. Regime change, indeed.

If it can be done there, then it can be done here. Look at Keir Starmer's tragicomic transition from the man whose red line was saving freedom of movement, to the man whose red line is preventing any return to freedom of movement, which in any case does not mean what most people in Britain thinks that it means.

Being an EU citizen has never conferred an absolute right to live in any EU member state of your choosing. Britain chose to apply it like that because it had chosen an economic model that depended on mass immigration, the model to which the CBI wants to return. Truss's and Kwarteng's model openly depended on that, too. Logically, so does Hunt's and Rishi Sunak's. And so would Starmer's.

The broad electorate is waking up to the fact that you cannot believe a word that Starmer says, because nor does he. There are two years to go before the next General Election. We are heading for a hung Parliament. To strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty, we need to hold the balance of power. Owing nothing to either main party, we must be open to the better offer. There does, however, need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not.

David Baddiel Doesn't Count

Behind some paywall, Victoria Coren Mitchell has been gushing over David Baddiel's latest effort, without mentioning that he introduced her to her husband. As someone of roughly her generation, it comes as news to me that blackface was acceptable in the 1990s, even among the white people by whom I was almost entirely surrounded while growing up. It must have been a class thing. Certainly, the reaction of Fantasy Football League's studio audience to Baddiel's first impersonation of Jason Lee included an audible element of heavy shock. If blacking up was mainstream entertainment, then who else was doing it?

Baddiel has been in two comedy partnerships, and in both cases the other bloke has been the funny one. For many years, Baddiel hardly appeared at all except as a guest on one of Frank Skinner's shows. In his late fifties, he wants to reinvent himself as a public intellectual by taking up a cause that places him beyond criticism. He has therefore had to go through the motions of apologising in person to Lee. But even then, he still managed to present himself as somehow the victim.

Baddiel ostentatiously walked among visibly Orthodox Jews without ever asking them what they thought, and almost everyone who was permitted to speak in Jews Don't Count was a professional entertainer, mostly in comedy. Touchingly, the top of the bill was felt to be David Schwimmer, another one who had not been seriously famous since the last century, in something that was in its way just as racist as Baddiel's Lee routine, but who also clearly fancied an Indian summer as a sage. Let them form a double act, so that this time, Baddiel could be less funny than a man who had never even written his own lines.

A Cockroach Is As A Cockroach Does

It turns out to be true. Regular readers will know that there have long been those in the Labour Party in these parts, or formerly of it, who called me "Speedboat", "Look what you could have won." But the people who think every day about how much they hate me call me "The Cockroach", "the only thing that would survive a nuclear holocaust."

Although they do also have a presence in Durham City among mentally unstable alcoholics who think that I make things go bump in the night, those latter are most notable for their control of the Labour Party in North Durham, the constituency into which it is proposed to move Lanchester, and which in that case I would contest at the next General Election. Let them test their theory. They have tried everything else. Let them deploy against me one of their beloved nuclear weapons.

Ah, the Labour Party, so right-wing that it is now outflanked on the left several times each week by the most right-wing Government to have lasted more than eight weeks since the War. Note that while Will Dry's Labour Party membership led to his expulsion from the Conservative Party, the reverse did not apply. He may still be a member of the Labour Party, as may any number of the vast array of Spads, of whom the Prime Minister alone seems to need 28.

I have been asked what I thought of the return of Patricia Hewitt, since I had done more than anyone else alive to publicise the story of her, Harriet Harman, and the Paedophile Information Exchange. Everyone knows that story now. The point is that no one cares. It was Hewitt who told speakers at Labour Party Conferences, "Do not use the word "equality"; the preferred term is "fairness"." She it was, a mere Press Officer, who, in a sign of things to come, was not told where to get off for having presumed so to instruct her betters.

Hewitt had secured employment from Neil Kinnock by writing him a gushing letter of support during his Leadership campaign, exactly the same as the one that she had sent simultaneously to Roy Hattersley. She went on to help found the Institute for Public Policy Research, and then, soon after Tony Blair became Leader, to become Head of Research at Andersen Consulting. That was a position for which she had no apparent qualification beyond her closeness to the Prime Minister in Waiting. In 1997, she entered Parliament, he entered Downing Street, and the Labour commitment to regulate such companies was dropped. 

As was the previous Conservative Government's absolute ban on all work for Andersen in view of its role in the DeLorean fraud. Andersen paid just over £21 million of the £200 million that Margaret Thatcher and John Major had demanded, barely covering the Government's legal costs. It went on to write, among other things, a report claiming that the Private Finance Initiative was good value for money. That was the only report on the subject that the Blair Government ever cited, since it was the only one to say that ridiculous thing.

As Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, Hewitt tried to give auditors limited liability. It took the Conservative Opposition and the Bush Administration to see her off. Also a former Health Secretary, she was still a sitting Labour MP when she was mostly a paid lobbyist for private healthcare. In September 2020, she was made an Adviser to the Board of Trade. And now, this. 

Welcome to the return of the condescending New Labour ladies, a type that otherwise died out with Joyce Grenfell, and even she had been doing it as a joke. The likes of Hewitt and Harman took themselves completely seriously, and they still do. Nor is their reemergence confined to the present Government. Certain Labour finishing schools with names like "The Future Candidates Programme" are producing a whole new generation of them, taught to walk with books on their heads but not how to read, yet somehow better-born and born better.

More broadly, the Labour candidates who are being selected for the next General Election not only lack campaigning backgrounds, but are drawn heavily from that against which most campaigns have to be fought, the right-wing Labour machine in local government. Yet the Conservatives do seem to be taking fright.

William Wragg, Chloe Smith, Dehenna Davison: I am older than all three of those retirees, which delights me, because someone who thought that he would have been Prime Minister by now is older again and has never been elected above Parish level. Anyway, the boundary changes here in County Durham are a nightmare, but Bishop Auckland's are not the worst. Davison's majority would probably have been reduced, but she could have held on.

Regardless of party, people who lose their seats in Parliament stand a more than 50 per cent chance of still being unemployed 12 months later. So much for, "I could make twice as much outside." Based on the salary alone, that would be £168,288. Almost no one makes that.

Those who do are rarely, if ever, public sector middle-class people whose union reps had taken them to one side and told them that they had peaked, but that Labour seats had been arranged to keep them ticking over for the next 20 to 25 years. Or private sector middle-class people who had been taken to one side at the Rotary Club or the Masons and told that they had peaked, but that Conservative seats had been arranged to keep them ticking over for the next 20 to 25 years. Or drawn from that cross-party collection of people who had simply taken over the seats of the close relatives or the family friends who had been their only previous employers.

There were 3,415 candidates at the last General Election. Add in those who unsuccessfully sought selection by their political parties, and a figure of 10,000 would not be unreasonable. There is no shortage of people who would like to be MPs. And we would have no trouble living on £84,144 per annum, plus huge, self-certified expenses. Admittedly, making that outside might be a bit of a stretch. But the same would be true of the people who were in Parliament now. As it always has been.

Labour is already openly down one seat. It expresses no hope of retaining Islington North against Jeremy Corbyn. Its candidate there would be lucky to place fourth. But if Corbyn really were a friend of Hamas, Hezbollah and the IRA, a man with links to the regimes in Russia and Iran, then there would be no applicants to become that candidate. No one would dare. Would you? Well, there you are, then.

The same has always been true of Corbyn in general. If anyone had ever thought that he really was in a position to send round the boys from South Beirut and West Belfast, from Kerry and Khan Yunis, then they would have shown him a great deal more respect, in the Tony Soprano sense of the word. That they have not and do not, proves conclusively that they did not and do not. The simple presence of a Labour candidate against Corbyn will reiterate that fact.

Nor would there be any Labour candidate against me if the people who called me "The Cockroach" believed that I was the international terrorist that they had framed me as being. If anyone at all believed that, then I would still be in prison. Do look up the details of what I was supposed to have done. If anyone believed those, then I would never be released. Anyone who had done them probably ought not to be.

We are heading for a hung Parliament. To strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty, we need to hold the balance of power. Owing nothing to either main party, we must be open to the better offer. There does, however, need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not.

Getting Down's To It

One of Margaret Thatcher's last legislative gifts to the nation was the formal legalisation of abortion up to birth.

So, just as there needs to be the Commons vote that there has never been on the Gillick competence that ought justly to be known as Thatcher competence, let there also be a Commons division on abortion up to birth for Down's Syndrome.

Risk Assessment

Even the Americans are repatriating their citizens who had joined IS, in order to put them on trial. We should do that with Shamima Begum, from whom this P5 state is pretending to be under threat. That pretence would embolden dangerous people if they were to fall for it.

The Home Secretary, who is presently Suella Braverman, may revoke the British citizenship of anyone whom she thought ought to be eligible for any other nationality, whatever the other country in question might have to say on the matter. Non-doms, think on.

What To Mone About

The Michelle Mone story was exactly the sort of corruption that happened all the time under the Blair Government, the old hands from which are all over the Starmer Leadership. That was truly scandalous, and so is this. This is truly scandalous, and so was that.

Unlike the ennoblement of Dominic Johnson, who may not have been a Minister for very long, but who would always have been given a peerage. If you just do not like Jacob Rees-Mogg and by extension anyone who has anything to do with him, then, like someone who just does not like Jeremy Corbyn and by extension anyone who has anything to do with him, you need to get over it.

A Role In The Process

Of course there are not going to be rail and postal strikes at Christmas. It will be deals that will be struck. By this Government, anyway. Mick Lynch had a meeting with the Secretary of State for Transport today, and they both described it as productive. He would not have been allowed through the door by anyone who had had to answer to Keir Starmer or to the people to whom Starmer was answerable.

The Labour Party now looks as ridiculous as it deserves to look on everything from this, to the Chagos Islands, to support for almost all of the abandoned mini-Budget, to the discarded wheeze of making Britain only the fifth country on Earth to move its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. The Government should call Labour's bluff and proscribe Otzma Yehudit as a terrorist organisation, just as the Thatcher Government banned Meir Kahane himself from this country. Any criticism of that decision would be a breach of the IHRA Definition.

Bringing us to David Baddiel's latest plug for his book. Almost everyone in his programme was a professional entertainer, mostly in comedy. He and Stephen Fry vie, clearly in good nature, for the position of Britain's preeminent public intellectual. Based on what, exactly? On the blackface question, Baddiel presented himself as the victim. The cession of intellectual and moral authority to comedians since the 1990s is evident from the Have I Got News for You? social media account, which, like the rest of the Starmerite media, is burning with class hatred towards struggling workers with whom the Conservative Government is negotiating unconditionally.

That said, there is still much to be done on the Chagos Islands, where the Government is dealing only with Mauritius, where Chagossians have not always been well-treated, rather than with the Islanders themselves. If the American base on Diego Garcia were to be retained, a situation that would be far from ideal, then Britain should name its price, with the monies to go to the Chagossian people.

Tony Benn and Tam Dalyell are dead, while Alex Salmond and George Galloway are out of Parliament, so by far the staunchest remaining parliamentary supporter of the Chagossian cause is Jeremy Corbyn. On its own, justice for the Chagos Islanders would make worthwhile his 39 years and counting in the House of Commons, both in itself and against the records of Labour Rightists from Denis Healey to David Miliband. What does the Labour frontbench even say about the live issue of the British Indian Ocean Territory? Apparently, nothing whatever, just as it remains committed to most of Trussonomics, just as it supports the downright Fascist regime that has now emerged in Israel, and just as it opposes the Government's talks with the unions.

We are heading for a hung Parliament. To strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty, we need to hold the balance of power. Owing nothing to either main party, we must be open to the better offer. There does, however, need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not.

Through The Net

More than 60 per cent of the net half a million immigrants have been the 190,000 from Ukraine and the 120,000 from Hong Kong. Think on.

Net migration in the tens of thousands per year finally disappeared from the Conservative manifesto in 2019, having been a joke for years, but it is Suella Braverman's and her fan club's chosen ground, so it is the ground on which she and they must and do fall politically. "Overall, numbers will come down," said even the 2019 manifesto. Here we are.

Zelensky himself has become such an embarrassment that negative stories about his corrupt and repressive regime are now placed in even the best-bred of organs. We told you so. Yet there are reports of Ukrainians going home to the country on which, for now, Britain still spends without limit while allowing its own people to be turned out onto the streets in winter via the section 21 eviction notices that, again, the 2019 Conservative manifesto had promised to ban.

Meanwhile, the disturbances at the colossal Foxconn plant in Zhengzhou bring to the fore the fact that that enormous Taiwanese corporation is the largest private employer in the People's Republic of China, to which it is closely allied in the repression of dissent. The Chinese New Left, highly trained Marxists who are applying that training as a forceful critique of the present condition of the working class, are a large and growing nuisance to the regime, and had close ties to sections of Corbynism. For now, the chance of a Government with any knowledge of that rising phenomenon has been lost. That may well prove a very great loss, indeed.

If you are itching for a war with China over Taiwan, then you are simply ignorant of the basic reality that your Apple products are being brought to you by a Taiwanese behemoth from a China with which it is hand in steel-studded glove. That same Chinese State directly runs our rail services and builds our nuclear power stations, just as all of Apple's technology, like that of all of the Silicon Valley giants, was originally developed by the federal government, for the federal government. Those pillars of the American liberal Deep State are already spying on us all the time, just as Israeli spyware is all over WhatsApp, for sale to anyone who wants to buy it. The Russians were hacking Liz Truss's phone while she was Prime Minister, because of course they were.

Yet we used to do these things for ourselves. It was Tony Benn who founded the National Enterprise Board, which invested in Acorn Computing, which helped to develop the ARM Processors that are found in all iPhones. So, including the ones assembled at Zhengzhou, all iPhones are Bennite. Before privatisation, we had the makings of a British Huawei. But this side of renationalisation, we never can have. And like the Liberal Democrats since their foundation in 1988, Labour since 1995 has been constitutionally committed to the problem. Being purely and simply a vehicle for securing power, the Conservative Party carries no such baggage.

We are heading for a hung Parliament. To strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty, we need to hold the balance of power. Owing nothing to either main party, we must be open to the better offer. There does, however, need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not.

A Warm Welcome

The warmest of welcomes to the eight billionth human being in the world today. The problem with the world is not that it has people in it. We must celebrate the full compatibility between the highest view of human demographic, economic, intellectual and cultural expansion and development, and the most active concern for the conservation of the natural world and of the treasures bequeathed by such expansion and development in the past.

That means growth, industry, what someone once nearly called “the white heat of technology”, and the equitable distribution of their fruits among and within the nations of the world, so that everyone might enjoy at least the standard of living that we ourselves already enjoyed.

There is always climate change, and any approach to it must protect and extend secure employment with civilised wages and working conditions, encourage economic development around the world, uphold the right of the working class and of people of colour to have children, hold down and as far as practicable reduce the fuel prices that always hit the poor hardest, and refuse to restrict travel opportunities or a full diet to the rich. In Britain, we must be unequivocal about regretting the defeat of the miners in 1985.

We sent our manufacturing to India and China, yet now we have the gall to criticise their carbon emissions. And we expect to depend for energy on the Sun, the wind and the tides, precisely because it is beyond our power to stop them from doing what they do and we just have to live with it, yet we also expect to be able to stop climate change rather than finding ways of living with it. I am strongly in favour of solar, wind and tidal energy in the mix. The base of that mix is nuclear and coal. The coal without which there can be no steel, and thus no wind turbines or tidal turbines.

Any economic arrangement is a political choice, not a law of physics, and the “free” market cannot deal with climate change while defending and expanding our achievements. That is precisely why it is being promoted. But instead, we need the State, albeit a vastly more participatory and democratic State than has often existed.

The energy sources to be preferred are those which provided high-wage, high-skilled, high-status jobs. Harness the power of the State, and deliver an all-of-the-above energy policy based around civil nuclear power and this country’s vast reserves of coal. Around those twin poles of nuclear power and of the clean coal technology in which Britain was the world leader until the defeat of the Miners’ Strike, let there be oil, gas, lithium, wind, solar, tidal, and everything else, bathing this country in heat and light. This is why we have a State.

We are heading for a hung Parliament. To strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty, we need to hold the balance of power. Owing nothing to either main party, we must be open to the better offer. There does, however, need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not. 

Reach For The Stars

John McFall is an inspiration to every one of us, and I do not mean only those of us who are physically disabled. Of course we should be going back to the Moon, and well beyond it. People who think that these missions impoverish anyone, even as an initial outlay, do not understand how the money supply works. And if God had not intended us to be a spacefaring species, then He would never have put anything up there for us to find.

“To increase the power of Man over Nature, and to abolish the power of Man over Man,” said Trotsky. “Dominion,” says the God of the Bible. Dominion over the beasts, thus over the land, and thus over everything on and under the land. Dominion over the fish, thus over the waters, and thus over everything in and under the waters.

And dominion over the birds, thus over the sky, and thus over everything in the sky, as far up as the sky goes, and the sky goes up a very long way. That dominion is entrusted so that we might “be fruitful and multiply”. Entrusted as it is to the whole human race, its purpose is, “To increase the power of Man over Nature, and to abolish the power of Man over Man.” 

Life is the geological force that shapes the Earth, and the emergence of human cognition fundamentally transforms the biosphere, not least by the uniquely human phenomenon of economic growth, so that human mastery of nuclear processes is beginning to create resources through the transmutation of elements, enabling us, among other things, to explore space and to exploit the resources of the Solar System. Vladimir Vernadsky and Krafft Ehricke will yet have their day.

The United States Space Force will do important work in research and development, work such as probably only the United States could do, or at least coordinate. But space is being both privatised and militarised, and that by the country that does not recognise it as a common resource for all humanity. There needs to be a return to President Eisenhower’s proposal, in a speech to the United Nations General Assembly on 22nd September 1960, for the principles of the Antarctic Treaty to be extended to Outer Space.

Then we might begin to exercise dominion that has been entrusted to us, as a species, over the birds, thus over the sky, and thus over everything in the sky, as far up as the sky goes. Exercise that dominion in order to “be fruitful and multiply”. Exercise that dominion, “To increase the power of Man over Nature, and to abolish the power of Man over Man.”

We Mean Business

I pity whoever does media relations for HSBC after this. Michelle Mone is not really a businesswoman at all. This is not business, any more than the people over whom Keir Starmer fawns are meaningfully engaged in any such pursuit.

The withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union, including the Single Market and the Customs Union, provides a double opportunity, both to reorganise the British economy under State direction, and to begin to develop a fully independent British foreign policy, including in relation to the United States. On that basis, Britain could be entering a new pro-business age.

The pro-business tradition came down to the Attlee Government from the ultraconservative figures of Colbert and Bismarck, via the Liberals Keynes and Beveridge, and it held sway in Britain until the Callaghan Government's turn to monetarism in December 1976.

That tradition corresponds closely but critically to the Hamiltonian American School as expanded by the American System of Henry Clay, a pro-business tradition that between the 1860s and the 1970s worked to make the United States the world's largest economy, with the world's highest standard of living, culminating in the glorious achievements of the New Deal, which in turn made possible the Civil Rights movement.

With a strict division between investment banking and retail banking, large amounts of central government credit, over a long term and at low if any rates of interest, would build great national projects, notably enormous expansions in infrastructure. Those would then pay for themselves many times over, ably assisted by pro-business tariffs and subsidies, and by a pro-business National Bank to promote the growth of productive enterprises rather than speculation.

A sovereign state with its own free floating, fiat currency has as much of that currency as it chooses to issue to itself, with readily available fiscal and monetary means of controlling any inflationary effect. Those means therefore require to be under democratic political control.

For the good of business, we should implement Theresa May's original Prime Ministerial agenda of workers' and consumers' representation in corporate governance, shareholders' control over executive pay, restrictions on pay differentials within companies, an investment-based Industrial Strategy and infrastructure programme including greatly increased housebuilding, action against tax avoidance including a ban on public contracts for tax-avoiding companies, a real cap on energy prices, a ban or significant restrictions on foreign takeovers, a ban on unpaid internships, and an inquiry into Orgreave.

For the good of business, the approval of the House of Commons should be required for changes to interest rates, a strict Glass-Steagall division should be introduced between investment banking and retail banking, the Freedom of Information Act should be extended to the City of London, its municipal franchise should be conformed to that of local government in general, all tax havens under British jurisdiction should be closed, non-domiciled tax status should be abolished, the Big Four accounting firms should be broken up, auditors should be banned by Statute from selling extras, they should have unlimited liability, Crown immunity should be abolished, and Limited Partnerships and Limited Liability Partnerships should be required to have at least one member who was a natural person resident in the United Kingdom.

For the good of business, the State should buy a stake in every FTSE 500 company, large enough to secure Board-level representation, for the exercise of which both the First and the Second Lords of the Treasury would be accountable to the House of Commons, so that after any investment in public services, the dividends would be distributed equally to everyone by the Treasury.

And for the good of business, public bodies and public contractors should be required by Statute to buy British wherever possible and to buy local wherever possible, while employment rights should begin with employment and apply regardless of the number of hours worked, leading to a four-day working week as soon as practicable.

We are heading for a hung Parliament. To strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty, we need to hold the balance of power. Owing nothing to either main party, we must be open to the better offer. There does, however, need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not. 

Controlling Our Borders

The Home Secretary's blithe admission that the Home Office had failed to control our borders ought to have resulted in her resignation, along with those of the rest of her Ministerial team and of all of her Department's senior civil servants. But Suella Braverman is untouchable, as the darling of what is in fact only a Hard Right rump, too small to defeat the Government even in alliance with a united Opposition that would itself be most unlikely.

Yet a stroke of this ridiculous person's pen is enough to revoke the British citizenship of anyone whom she thought ought to be eligible for another nationality. If Scotland were to become independent, then five million people born there but living elsewhere in the United Kingdom would find themselves in that position, along with many, many millions of us who were of Scottish descent without ever having lived there.

What if Scotland were to introduce something like the American requirement to file a tax return in order to retain citizenship while living abroad? Andrew Robertson has captained the Scottish national football team 38 times since 2014, most recently last Wednesday. He plays for Liverpool. He would have no vote in a referendum on Scottish independence, yet a Yes vote might place him under a fiscal obligation.

The big electoral losers from Scottish independence would be the Conservatives. This is not new. Mostly on sectarian grounds, Scotland was regarded as "a Tory heartland" until the 1960s, and the Conservatives controlled Glasgow City Council into the 1970s. On 1950s Election Nights, Labour activists assumed that they had won, "But then the results came in from Scotland."

In 1979, it was the SNP that tabled a Motion of No Confidence in the Labour Government of the day. That passed by one vote, resulting in the General Election that brought Margaret Thatcher to power with an overall majority of 43, including 22 MPs from Scotland. Scotland provided Thatcher's majority precisely, at an Election that had effectively been called by the SNP, whereas no Labour Government has ever depended on Scotland for its majority.

In 1992 and in 2017, only Scotland recorded a net gain in Conservative seats, and in 2017 that was a very large net gain, when the Conservatives took 12 seats from the SNP, thereby enabling Theresa May to remain Prime Minister, as would not otherwise have been arithmetically possible even with the support of the DUP. Thank or blame Scotland for that fact that Thatcher became Prime Minister, and thank or blame Scotland for that fact that Jeremy Corbyn never did.

The Conservatives lost seven of those seats back to the SNP in 2019, but by tiny margins. And they retained five, plus the one that they had already had, giving them more seats than the Scottish Liberal Democrats and the remnant Scottish Labour Party put together. The only constituency in Scotland with a Labour MP is the one with Morningside in it, and that MP had been all ready to join Change UK until the very last moment. There are a lot of excellent arguments against Scottish independence. But "no Labour Governments ever" is not one of them, even if you particularly wanted a Labour Government. Nor is "everlasting Tory Government".

Brexit is in the process of being reversed specifically in order to suit the South of England. Singapore-on-Thames was tried for a few weeks, but even that was longer than anyone could possibly have endured it. There is more chance of Singapore-on-Leith, what with the SNP's leaked plan to charge wealthy people to use the NHS. Try suggesting that in South West Surrey. It would go down as well as Brexit did. That is why Brexit has never fully happened, and is now being reversed. The Conservatives are desperately trying to fight off the Liberal Democrats in the South by planning to re-join the Single Market and the Customs Union, and to join the Schengen Area into the bargain, but the scheme has leaked, so they are going to have to find a subtler way of going about it. They will, though. The South has risen, and this is the result.

We are heading for a hung Parliament. To strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty, we need to hold the balance of power. Owing nothing to either main party, we must be open to the better offer. There does, however, need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not.

Bringing It Home

As Michael Gove excoriates Clarion Housing, remember that one of its non-executive directors is Lord Barwell of Grenfell Tower. What a day for the Government to cave in on housing. This rebellion would have been meaningless unless Labour had been planning to vote with the rebels, to abolish mandatory local housing targets. Three years after the last General Election, there has still been no ban on section 21 evictions, which increased by 121 per cent in the last financial year. In central and local government until 1979, the Conservatives used to take housing at least as seriously as anyone else did. But since 1997, even Labour in government has failed miserably on this issue.

We need a minimum of 100,000 new homes every year for at least 10 years, including council homes with an end to the Right to Buy, with the capital receipts from council house sales released in order to build more council housing, and with councils empowered to borrow to that end. We need a minimum of 50 per cent of any new development to be dedicated to affordable housing, with affordability defined as 50 per cent of average rents. We need rent controls, a ban on no-fault evictions, action against the buying up of property by foreign investors in order to leave it empty, repeal of the Vagrancy Act, and the outlawing of practices such as "poor doors" and discrimination in children's play facilities based on the nature of their parents'  tenure.

We need a statutory requirement of planning permission for change of use if it were proposed to turn a primary dwelling into a secondary dwelling, a working family home into a weekend or holiday home. That would set the pattern for the empowerment of the rural working class, assisted both by the Land Value Tax and by a windfall tax on the supermarkets in order to fund agriculture and small business, with strict regulation to ensure that the costs of this were not passed on to suppliers, workers, consumers, communities, or the environment. Rent-to-buy schemes also demand serious attention, and we should be setting up one or more non-profit lettings agencies.

"It is entirely undesirable," wrote Aneurin Bevan,"that on modern housing estates only one type of citizen should live. If we are to enable citizens to lead a full life, if they are each to be aware of the problems of their neighbours, then they should all be drawn from different sectors of the community. We should try to introduce what was always the lovely feature of English and Welsh villages, where the doctor, the grocer, the butcher and the farm labourer all lived in the same street."

In 1979, two fifths of people lived in council housing, an impossible figure for a mere "safety net for the poor". Public provision, by definition, never is such a net. Not the NHS, not state education, not public transport, none of it. As recently as 1980, what is now a breathtaking 20 per cent of the richest tenth of the population lived in social housing. Now, after four decades of selling off the stock and of not building any more, the stringent criteria for new tenants effectively guarantee a large number of single mothers of dependent children who are thus unable to work full-time, if at all, and of people newly released from prison or newly discharged from psychiatric institutions.

Margaret Thatcher's assault on council housing is the one thing that her supporters still feel able to defend unconditionally. But in reality, it created the Housing Benefit racket, and it used the gigantic gifting of capital assets by the State to enable the beneficiaries to enter the property market ahead of private tenants, or of people still living at home, who in either case had saved for their deposits. What, exactly, was or is conservative or Tory about that? Or about moving in the characters from Shameless either alongside, or even in place of, the respectable working class? Shameless began under Tony Blair's model for any future majority Labour Government.

We are heading for a hung Parliament. To strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty, we need to hold the balance of power. Owing nothing to either main party, we must be open to the better offer. There does, however, need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not.

Policy and Briefing

The appointment of Will Dry as a Special Adviser to the Prime Minister should not surprise anyone. Without any sort of contest, Rishi Sunak was enthroned for a very specific purpose. When "Tories" are said to be angry or worried about any part of that, then they are very few in number, and utterly remote from power.

By contrast, beyond being a Spad, Dry has no specific area of responsibility. On at least £40,500 per annum, this boy of around 22 or 23, who is notable only for his attempts to prevent and reverse Brexit, and who was active in Sunak's Leadership campaign, is just there, in the Policy and Briefing Unit, at the very heart of government.

More broadly, the Prime Minister feels that he needs 28 Special Advisers. Twenty-eight. Few of them seem to have been alive that many years. If there are that many of them, then how Special can the Advice of any one of them possibly be? What in the world is a "Head of Grid, Union and Regional"? One Tim Raggett is listed only as "Video and Photography", which suggests a cameraman, these days presumably by means of a smartphone.

The most that a Spad may be paid is £145,000, and there is no maximum number of them. Even the Leaders of the House of Commons and of the House of Lords currently have one each, and the Chief Whip has two, despite their lack of an policy role. Advising them on what, exactly? 12 of the Prime Minister's are in the Policy and Briefing Unit, and two more are in Legislative Affairs, while his Private Office contains both a Deputy Chief of Staff (Policy) and a Deputy Chief of Staff (Political), two different people each of whom is doubtless getting by on a lot more than Young Master Dry's 40 grand a year.

Still, that does mean at least 14, and arguably 16, people who constitute a kind of think tank or faculty right there in 10 Downing Street. In a variation on the theme of imagining that you were the Prime Minister, imagine that you had those positions in your gift. You could have whoever you wanted. No one who was serious about contributing to public policy could turn you down. Even any loss of income would hardly leave anyone claiming Universal Credit. Whom would you ask? Yet look who gets these things. Look who has been getting them since the Blair years or earlier. And look at the results.

Sunak is doing what he was installed to do, leading Nigel Farage to speculate publicly that he may return to the electoral fray. He ought to be cautious in the extreme. If Jeremy Corbyn had lasted any longer, then he would have been taken out by "a Far Right lone wolf" whom it would have been "an Internet conspiracy theory" to have pointed out was suspiciously well-connected. If Farage looked set to cost the Conservatives any significant number of votes at what was otherwise set to be a very close General Election, then "an Islamist terrorist", or some such, would remove him. He will already know that. Some things are worth the risk, but he is going to have to judge it for himself.

We are heading for a hung Parliament. To strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty, we need to hold the balance of power. Owing nothing to either main party, we must be open to the better offer. There does, however, need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not.

Once In A Generation

Time is running out for the SNP, which increasingly stands exposed as just another party of NHS privatisation and all that. We told you so.

The Parliament of the United Kingdom should now enact primary legislation to rule out any referendum on Scottish independence before 18th September 2044, 30 years after the last one.

Parliament cannot bind its successors, but this would make the point.

Unhealthy Signs

Of course the plan to end universal healthcare free at the point of need in Scotland was not just officials freelancing. Who would report that? We have been trying forever to tell you about the SNP, and this is also what Greens look like in government, as increasingly they are.

Meanwhile, with Wes Streeting as its Shadow Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, the Labour Party is firmly committed to the Blair Government's signature domestic policy of the privatisation of the National Health Service in England.

That idea existed only on the fringes of the think tank circuit until Tony Blair, Alan Milburn and Paul Corrigan took office in 1997. Since then, it has been the policy of all three parties except under Jeremy Corbyn, and of most Labour MPs and all Labour Party staffers continuously. Of course, other than Blair, Milburn and Corrigan, no one has done more than Jeremy Hunt to privatise the English NHS.

We are heading for a hung Parliament. To strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty, we need to hold the balance of power. Owing nothing to either main party, we must be open to the better offer. There does, however, need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not. Who would you like to see hold the balance of power instead? The Greens? The SNP?

What Culpability We Prescribed

Everyone who scored for England this afternoon would be liable to have his British citizenship revoked under Shamima's Law.

Without having to give a reason, then the Home Secretary, who is herself a persistent and flagrant security risk, can do that to anyone whom she thought ought to be eligible for another nationality, whether or not they were. Bangladesh has consistently and understandably refused to have anything to do with the London-born Shamima Begum.

What sort of permanent member of the United Nations Security Council claims that its national security is threatened by Begum? Nothing about her story surprises me, yet it still has the power to shock. Undoubtedly with the full cooperation of its British counterparts, Canadian intelligence was trafficking British girls to Syria to join the side that we were aiding and abetting there while bombing it across the Sykes-Picot Line in Iraq, where our intervention had created it in the first place.

The 15-year-old Begum was married almost immediately upon her arrival in that country, and pregnant almost immediately after that. "She wanted it" is not an argument that would normally be admitted under such circumstances.

All of this had the enthusiastic support of the Liberal Democrats, of the Labour Party until 2015, and of more than 90 per cent of Labour MPs, as well as the whole of the party's staff, to the very end, if it is not still going on. Both economically and internationally, and the connection between the two has never been more glaring, Labour is now far to the right of the Conservatives.

Begum ought to be tried by a jury that, unless it were unanimously convinced beyond reasonable doubt of her guilt, ought to deliver a verdict of not guilty, which should be an enduring verdict, affording lifelong protection from double jeopardy. In the event of such a conviction, then like a 15-year-old runner for county lines, she would not be blameless, but like a 15-year-old runner for county lines, she would not be the most to blame.

Keep saying it until in quite sinks in. Even while bombing the IS that it had created in Iraq, NATO was so committed to the victory of IS in Syria, as in principle it remains, that, via the NATO member state of Turkey, it trafficked British schoolgirls to Syria to hand over to IS. In at least one case, a 15-year-old was pregnant almost immediately, having been married so soon after her arrival that the arrangements had clearly been made in advance.

Via the NATO member state of Turkey, IS fighters are now being brought in as part of NATO's side in Ukraine, where they have already carried out the suicide bombing of the Kerch Bridge under British direction. Russia is bringing in Assadists against them. IS is now part of the side that we are backing in Ukraine, while, yet again, everyone who knows anything at all about the subject is pointing out that our position is suicidally insane. Our rulers never learn.

And do we know that our girls are not being smuggled into Ukraine, which is itself a global centre of sex trafficking, in order to be handed over to IS? Or our boys, come to that, to be sent to the front line? If you are brown and working-class, then at 15 you can be trafficked to IS. If you are black and working-class, then at 15 you can be strip-searched at school. If you are white and working-class, then at 15 you can very possibly be trafficked to something like the Azov Battalion. But if you were posh, and probably white although that is not quite the point, then at 15 you could this summer vote on who the Prime Minister should be, even if she did not remain the Prime Minister for very long.

It is still British Government policy that IS should have won in Syria, yet under Shamima's Law, if the Home Secretary thought that you would merely qualify for another nationality, whether or not you held it, wanted it, or were really eligible for it, then your British citizenship could now be revoked at a stroke of the Home Secretary's pen.

If you are one of the huge proportion of the population of Great Britain with an ancestral connection to Ireland, or if you are almost any of the current inhabitants of Northern Ireland, including all of the DUP's MPs, then your British citizenship could now be revoked at a stroke of the Home Secretary's pen. 

Saint Helena will never become independent, so I am all right this side of Scottish independence. But beyond the fair South Atlantic, most of Britain's former colonies in the Caribbean are independent now. And 50 per cent of people in Britain with an Afro-Caribbean parent also have a white parent. If you are in that position, even if your other ancestors have been Anglo-Saxon for as long as there have been any Anglo-Saxons, or even if Julius Caesar heard them speaking the language that was now Welsh, then your British citizenship could now be revoked at a stroke of the Home Secretary's pen.

And if you would qualify under Israel's Law of Return, which is considerably looser than the Rabbinical definition of who is Jewish, then your British citizenship could now be revoked at a stroke of the Home Secretary's pen. How's that for anti-Semitism?

One Love

The team of a corrupt, unstable and ideologically lunatic regime that squats on the ruins of a once great civilisation, has just beaten Iran 6-2.

Of the scorers for England, Jack Grealish previously played for Ireland, and as for the rest, just look at them.

That is working-class England, at least 50 per cent Irish, politically black, or both. If you need to, then get over it. You like it when it wins.

Electoral Calculus

The victory of Ian Byrne is all the sweeter for the suitcase full of bogus postal votes that the presiding Labour Party hack will have brought in order to fix things. That hack had, in turn, been brought in from London, and some of us can say "Enough said" about the staff of the London Regional Labour Party. If right-wing Labour MPs do not experience such tight contests for reselection, then we all know why.

Even Michael Crick is now openly concerned at the "unfair, verging on corrupt" parliamentary selection processes of the Labour Party. The membership lists illegally made available to favoured candidates. The truncated timetables. The failure to make members aware of the option of a postal vote. The intimidating phone calls to members, and visits to their homes. The videos, websites and leaflets that the anointed ones are allowed to utilise far in excess of the party's own spending limits. And so much more besides.

Imagine how people who behaved like that would run the country. Of course, some of us remember when they did. I for one was entirely unsurprised at the Forde Report and The Labour Files, having been called a "Mulatto" by one of the individuals in question for nearly 20 years. Under Keir Starmer, Labour has failed to oppose most, while having no policy to repeal any, of the Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Act, the Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Act, the Nationality and Borders Act, the Elections Act, and the staggering Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act. The same approach has been adopted in relation to the even more stunning Public Order Bill.

Yet the Police have had to pay damages to five Kill the Bill protesters after last March's Police riot against them in Bristol. Starmer and Labour have well and truly chosen their side. Just as Labour opposed only the abolition of the 45p rate of income tax, while supporting every other mini-Budget measure that the Government itself has since abandoned, so Labour did not oppose the "legal but harmful" clause that the Government itself is briefing that it may drop from the Online Safety Bill. Starmer himself was a major player, both in the general persecution of journalists through Operation Elveden, and in the specific persecution of Julian Assange.

This is the Labour Party that has revived the identity card scheme that Tony Blair long ago adopted and hardened in order to outflank its originator, the then Home Secretary, Michael Howard. Whose papers would the Police demand to see? A 15-year-old Etonian, such as David Cameron was when he took cannabis? Or 15-year-old Child Q, who had not in fact taken cannabis at all? A Just Stop Oil exhibitionist? Or a striking trade unionist, picketing to protect her children's food supply?

Yvette Cooper has given a "not in front of the children" rebuke to Stephen Kinnock, who has all the intellect for which his family has always been famous. But she is the monster that inflicted the Work Capability Assessment, leading to tens of thousands of deaths, while he locked himself in his car to avoid being breathalysed, just as Starmer avoided breathalysation by running away from the scene of an accident that he had caused. Ponder that business at Durham Miners' Hall, consider that Starmer's nose grows redder with each Prime Minister's Questions, and think on.

Labour has accepted the existence of a "fiscal black hole" of £55 billion, which is a figure made up out of thin air in order to justify predetermined policies. Therefore, Labour accepts both of Jeremy Hunt's fiscal rules, that underlying debt must be falling as a proportion of GDP at the end of a five-year rolling period, and that public sector borrowing over the same period must be below three per cent of GDP, rules that are not coincidentally reminiscent of those of the eurozone, where they were suspended during the pandemic but are due to be reactivated from the end of 2023. Labour will certainly go into the next General Election with a commitment to adhere to whatever departmental spending limits it had inherited.

Of course Labour would not abolish the House of Lords, and in any case it would only fall back on that one if it had nothing to say about anything more pressing, which is everything. Of course Labour would not abolish non-domicile tax status, even though that arrangement's defenders cannot explain where its beneficiaries would go, since it exists nowhere else on Earth. And of course Labour would not impose VAT on school fees, which is not even a particularly good idea, but which is the party's perennial internal crowdpleaser, the unfulfilled promise of which will always be too useful for when Labour activists started to ask what their party was actually for.

We are heading for a hung Parliament. To strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty, we need to hold the balance of power. Owing nothing to either main party, we must be open to the better offer. There does, however, need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not. One of several key players will be George Galloway, whom I urge you to come and hear in Sunderland on Tuesday 7th February 2023 at 7pm.

I shall be contesting whichever constituency had Lanchester in it, even if the Boundary Commission had gone through with its madcap scheme to move us into North Durham, of which the Lanchester ward would therefore comprise one tenth of the population but more than half of the land area. That would be an act of pure partisan spite, like the abolition of the North West Durham seat.

It beggars belief that, being in this ward, Castleside would not be in a constituency with the word "Consett" in its name, but rather in one that was centred on Chester-le-Street. At best, although that would still be saying almost nothing, Burnhope should be in North Durham, Castleside should be in Blaydon and Consett, and Lanchester should be either in that or in City of Durham. The Burnopfield and Dipton ward, however, is indeed to be in Consett and Blaydon, despite having been in North Durham in the past.

The addition of the Lanchester ward is the only proposed change to North Durham, yet Electoral Calculus claims that that would quadruple the Labour majority from 4,742 to 16,077, higher than it had been at any of the last four General Elections, with Labour wildly improbably predicted to win every ward. Look them up. If Labour intended to run a campaign smugly based on that, then I would take great pleasure in giving it a run for its money despite the near-total lack of mine.

At Blaydon and Consett, the predicted Labour majority is 15,265, with a clean sweep of wards the suggestion of which is downright laughable, since it bears no resemblance to the results in Consett over the last 20 years. With the support of the Independents, and assuming a Liberal Democrat paper campaign, then Richard Holden, whose office is already prominent in Consett town centre, would stand every chance against an MP whose office was prominent in the centre of Blaydon.

Not A Weak Week

One week ago, on the anniversary of the fall of the Ottoman Caliphate, there was an enormous explosion in Istanbul. The Turkish Government refused to accept the condolences of the United States. Turkey has been blocking Swedish and Finnish accession to NATO, and facilitating the transportation of Russian oil and gas. The huge story of this bombing has mysteriously gone away. For now.

By the middle of the week, the Ukrainians had messed up their false flag bombing of Poland, so NATO had come up with a cover story that of course no one believed, but to which Zelensky did not even have the good manners to stick. Exasperation with him began to show. Uncomfortable facts about his regime began to be mentioned even in refined salons. Some of us had been mentioning them for quite a while.

And by the end of the week, the Swedish prosecutor had confirmed that traces of explosives had been found where the Nord Stream pipelines had clearly been sabotaged. "It's done," Liz Truss had texted Antony Blinken immediately after that attack. The Russians had been hacking her phone, because of course they had, so they had known from the start about our act of war, not only against them, but also against the NATO member states of Germany, Denmark, Norway, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, as well as against Sweden and Finland. We have not heard the last of that. From any of them.

Echoing the suggestion that the Russians were and are shelling themselves inside Europe's largest nuclear power plant at Zaporizhzhia, you either believe that Russia sabotaged the two Nord Stream pipelines, which it could just have turned off, or you do not. That division will be definitive for decades to come, as we are all expected to bear any burden and pay any price rather than be conquered by a Russian Army that had no Non-Commissioned Officers, the intermediate tier without which no organisation can function, and which could not even subdue Ukraine.

Behind all of this is the recently inaugurated BRICS+ Dialogue with Argentina, Egypt, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Thailand, and the United Arab Emirates. If we would not have picked some of those partners, then it is very telling that they have accepted the invitation. In addition to Egypt and the UAE, Bangladesh and Uruguay are already members of the BRICS New Development Bank. Afghanistan, Algeria, Iran, Mexico, Nicaragua, Pakistan, Sudan, Syria, Turkey and Venezuela are also actively interested in BRICS alignment, while the unfolding General Election results in Malaysia are potentially epoch-making.

In such a world as this, it is no wonder that even Joe Biden has reiterated the One China policy, adding, "I do not think there's any imminent attempt on the part of China to invade Taiwan." We all know what that means. Now he needs to explain the aid to Ukraine that was laundered back to the Democratic Party, including his own campaign, through FTX. And we in Britain need to keep out our own Crazies, whether the ones who were previously around Liz Truss, or the ones who are still around Keir Starmer.

We are heading for a hung Parliament. To strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty, we need to hold the balance of power. Owing nothing to either main party, we must be open to the better offer. There does, however, need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not.