Too?

Already tonight, Newsnight was too embarrassed to mention the thing at all. We on the real Left never bought into #MeToo or #BelieveAllWomen, and we have certainly never placed any automatic confidence in the BBC, so you do not get to throw any of that at us. You, on the other hand, have now decided to sign up to all of that. You have chosen your petard, and be assured that you will be hoist on it.

Eight and a half weeks later, as even the Biden Administration and right-wing Labour MPs, never mind the sort of grand old Tory Arabists who are once again Foreign Office Ministers, are starting to express reservations, you come out with this, conveniently with dead witnesses and destroyed forensic evidence by definition. Tonight, the Israelis are claiming that hostages were raped but were drugged so that they could have no memory of it. Meanwhile, when a 13-year-old Palestinian boy was raped in an Israeli prison, where he too was a hostage, then the IDF raided the charity that had revealed that assault, and shut it down as a terrorist organisation.

The BBC's main source is May Golan, who told a rally that "I'm proud to be a racist", who led anti-black riots in Tel Aviv, who accused that city's Sudanese refugees of spreading AIDS by working as waiters, who joined Likud because she had failed to be elected on the ticket of a party that was classified as a terrorist organisation in the United States but which is now in coalition with Likud (its late founder was banned from Britain by Margaret Thatcher), who not unconnectedly secured exemption from military service on the grounds that she was religious but then decided that she was not, whose appointment as Consul General in New York was denounced by its normally fiercely pro-Israeli Jewish leaders, and whose elevation to Minister for Women's Empowerment was met with shocked disbelief even from people who were very well used to the machinations of Benjamin Netanyahu.

100,000 military age males had not been murdered in Kosovo. The attacks of 11th September 2001 had not come from Afghanistan; the suggestion that they had done so is the only 9/11 conspiracy theory that has ever done any active harm. There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Therefore, those weapons were not capable of deployment within 45 minutes. Saddam Hussein had not been feeding people into a giant paper shredder. He had not been attempting to obtain uranium from Niger.

A genocide had not been imminent in Benghazi. Gaddafi had not been feeding Viagra to his soldiers in order to encourage mass rape. He had not intended to flee to Venezuela. It was not an undisputed fact that Assad had gassed Ghouta. Sergei and Yulia Skripal were not dead, as announced on the front page of The Times on 12th March 2018. And 40 people in Salisbury had not required treatment for nerve agent poisoning, as claimed by The Times on 14th March 2018.

In the same way, there were not 1400 dead Israelis on 7th October, although seen from most of the world, even that would not have been awfully many, and certainly not enough to have justified subsequent and ongoing events. There was no more than one dead baby, who had been neither decapitated nor incinerated; most of the dead were military personnel. As most of the world has always simply taken as a given, it was the Israelis who bombed the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital, and there were no Hamas bases under that or any other hospital, or school, or church. Just as there was no pornography in Osama bin Laden's den, so there was no Arabic translation of Mein Kampf under the bed of a murdered child in Gaza.

The people who are now talking about these tellingly unverifiable rapes are the people who peddled every single one of those lies. Instead, believe those of us who never believed any of them. My own record is particularly strong. I disliked the still unarrested Russell Brand when that got me abused hysterically by those of my contemporaries who thought that Blairite politics made them the cool kids, and who have never grown up to this day, even if they have changed their tune on him. While I am sure that I could stand no more than a few seconds in the company of Andrew Tate, I cannot imagine that the United States would allow a white liberal American citizen to be treated as he has been, and I have said from the very start that would not be at all surprised if little or nothing ended up coming of this.

See also Cardinal Pell, Julian Assange, Alex Salmond, Ched Evans, and the victims of Freya Heath, whose conviction was merely set aside on a procedural technicality. You need a visa for Spain these days, and Mason Greenwood secured one to enable him to be loaned to Getafe, so that recording was provenly false. For the second time, in fact, since if it had been genuine, then the Crown Prosecution Service would have proceeded with what would therefore have been an open-and-shut case against him. I delight in his progress as Manchester United's enormous African fanbase loans its affections until justice be done. Take that, Rachel Riley, who is a kind of British May Golan, but without the brains or the charm.

This has nothing to do with liking anyone. The beatification will presumably be the occasion of a Papal Visit to Australia, but if possible I shall be in Rome for Cardinal Pell's canonisation. To keep Assange's work going, then I would die in his stead. While I am opposed to the marrow of my bones to the political cause to which Salmond has devoted his life, I expect that he and I would get on. But I doubt that Evans or Greenwood and I would find much to talk about. I know that Heath's victims and I would have more than enough for a very heated discussion indeed. I have already said what I thought of Tate and of who Brand used to be, as he himself broadly says these days. Likewise, and like Jeremy Corbyn, I dislike Hamas with the intensity of one who knows a lot more about it than, say, Keir Starmer.

Starmer is heavily dependent on Peter Mandelson, who stayed at Jeffrey Epstein's apartment while Epstein was an incarcerated sex offender and Mandelson was a Cabinet Minister. First Secretary of State, in fact. Deputy Prime Minister in all but name. This post is this site's thirty-sixth mention of the connection between Mandelson and Epstein, with the first having been as long ago as 16th August 2019, and with most of these posts having been substantially the same as comments on Guido Fawkes.

Yet no one seems to think that this is news, even though Mandelson is the star turn at major right-wing Labour fundraising events, and even though he would undoubtedly be in any Cabinet of  Starmer's, probably as Deputy Prime Minister in name, and certainly as such in practice. Even from his cell, Epstein was still making donations to "Petie", whose former live-in lover, Peter Wilby, has recently been convicted of having had 167 indecent images of children, including 22 of their being subjected to penetration, bestiality or sadism.

That provides some context to the fact that Starmer was the Director of Public Prosecutions when the decision was made not to prosecute Jimmy Savile. In the words of Doughty Street Chambers, on its page about Starmer, now amusingly removed from public view: "He was Director of Public Prosecutions and Head of the Crown Prosecution Service from 2008-2013. As DPP, Keir was responsible for all criminal prosecutions in England and Wales." Therefore, Starmer would have been responsible for the decision not to charge Savile even if he had never set eyes on the file.

But that is in any case inconceivable. We are talking about Jimmy Savile here. That Starmer took the decision not to charge Savile has been repeated all over the place, far beyond parliamentary privilege. Starmer has yet to sue anyone for having made it. Starmer's "experience" as DPP is held up by his supporters as his qualification to be Prime Minister. Yet now they insist that it was a purely titular headship such as might have been given on an unpaid basis to a minor member of the Royal Family. Or, in his heyday, to Jimmy Savile.

Due to Savile's fame and connections, of course that decision was not made by anyone other than Starmer, just as of course he was sly enough not to have left a paper trail. Why did Starmer let Savile off? Why is Starmer so dependent on Epstein's closest associate in Britain, indeed one of Epstein's closest associates in the world, who is also an ex-partner of Wilby's? What sort of person therefore wants Starmer to become Prime Minister?

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 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.