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.