They Are The Weak End

The marches are for a ceasefire, so according to YouGov, 76 per cent of people agree with the marchers, 58 per cent strongly so. Strong disagreement is confined to three per cent, one person in 33. Are there well over 50 million Hamas sympathisers in Britain? Are there 40 million staunch supporters of Hamas? Or, my dear three percenters, could it be that you are the ones who are out of step? And which other opinion that was held by only about two million people should be aggressively promoted by both main political parties and by the entire news media? Abuse us all you like. You called us every name under the Sun over Iraq, when we were the overwhelming majority, as we are now, and when we were proved right, as we are being now.

Armistice Day is the perfect day to march for a ceasefire, I am not aware of any objection from the Royal British Legion, and there has never been any such thing as Iain Duncan Smith's "Remembrance weekend", or any variation on that theme. I am 46, and I had never heard of it until today. The day before Remembrance Sunday has only ever been just another Saturday. I was a three-term Parish Councillor, my late father was by turns an Eighth Army soldier, a colonial archdeacon and a country parson, and I grew up in the Scouts. My mother's gong-laden family is practically colonial elite, with their faces on stamps, and with a seamount recently named after one of them. So I really do know what I am talking about. You do not get to make up a "Remembrance weekend" just because you do not like the fact that only the second ever million-strong demonstration in British history is going to be organised by the same interests and several of the same individuals as organised the first one, for all its missed opportunities.

But when I tell you that there is going to be a hung Parliament, then you can take that to the bank. I spent the 2005 Parliament saying that it was psephologically impossible for the Heir to Blair's Conservative Party to win an overall majority. I predicted a hung Parliament on the day that the 2017 General Election was called, and I stuck to that, entirely alone, all the way up to the publication of the exit poll eight long weeks later. And on the day that Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister, I predicted that a General Election between him and Keir Starmer would result in 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.