It required no great skill to shell the Missionaries of Charity, founded by Saint Teresa of Calcutta, and to blow up the generator so as to cut off the respirators to the more than 50 disabled people for whom those nuns were caring in Gaza City. But Israeli snipers have also killed a mother and daughter inside the adjacent Holy Family Church, noted centre of Hamas activity that it is. These are world class crack shots. They did not accidentally gun down three, three, hostages who were bare-chested, holding a white flag, and shouting "Help!" in Hebrew.
While they wait to be sacked from Abu Dhabi, those who are telling the Covid-19 bereaved to get back in their box are at least backing up the people who are saying the same to the Israeli hostages' families. Sell your shares in whoever is still insuring shipping in the Red Sea. But no one is so big that their actions can be allowed to block the Suez Canal, and today's article by David Cameron and Annalena Baerbock makes it clear that patience is approaching exhaustion.
It is inconceivable that that article has not been approved by the United States. Yet as with advocacy of Cameron's recent adoption of the American visa ban on the leaders of the West Bank settler violence that has led to the cancellation of Christmas in Bethlehem, any Labour MP who had written such a piece would have lost the whip, while any other Labour Party member who had done so would have been expelled.
Labour is now the greater evil, worse than the Tories, and specifically worse even than the Prime Minister of the austerity programme and of the war in Libya, who remains, for now, one of the West's last inveterate warmongers on Ukraine, but who still manages to be better than Labour on this. We should no more want Labour to win the next General Election than most of its MPs wanted it to win the last two, or than any of its staff wanted it to win the last four.
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.
The French now too, you're right no one gets to block the Suez Canal.
ReplyDeleteCatherine Colonna has even gone to Tel Aviv to say it.
DeleteYou can control both Wall Street and Hollywood, which can put you in every Biblical epic and in every Holocaust epic, even though you are not the only people of the Bible and you were not the only victims of the Holocaust. But your conduct can no more be permitted to lead to an obstruction of the Suez Canal than it could be permitted to lead to an obstruction of the Panama Canal. You are not that big. No one is.
For 18 years and counting, the sacred "centre ground" of British politics has been defined as whatever David Cameron happened to think. That is now the public school cult of T.E. Lawrence and of Glubb Pasha, the inventor of the black and white chequered keffiyeh. Seven Pillars of Wisdom, indeed.