On Track

Network Rail is the Department for Transport, so it is the Government that has agreed to unconditional talks with the RMT. There is a case for revisiting the Labour selection process that was used against Sam Tarry. At the very least, 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.

Three of the other four are the mighty Honduras, Guatemala and Kosovo, while the 2024 Presidential Election will show that at least that move had bought Donald Trump some political capital at home. What did Liz Truss expect to gain from it? What does Keir Starmer? Is every other country frightened of the Palestinians? That they had such power would have come as news to them even before the recent triumph of Otzma Yehudit. Once the new Home Secretary was in place, a formality even before that business with the Chinook, then Britain should proscribe Otzma Yehudit as a terrorist organisation. What would Starmer, David Lammy and Yvette Copper say to that?

Rishi Sunak is exposing New New Labour as a bizarre Hard Right sect very much like the one that he had overthrown, and the polls are narrowing accordingly, with Sunak beating Starmer on the question of who would make the better Prime Minister. 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.