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.