Accountability Down The Privy

We have killed people because they lived in the same place as those who, killing no one, had blockaded shipping, though not even our shipping. We and the Americans have gone low in our time, but this is something else, ranking only with the Biden Administration's decision to leave an American citizen, Gonzalo Lira, to die when it could have saved him with one videocall.

But waiting for Monday so that Parliament could have had a say would have achieved what, exactly? The Leader of the "Opposition", who maintains that bombing Yemen was not military action, was squared before it happened, as was the supposedly impartial Speaker of the House of Commons. If the Liberal Democrats and the SNP had also been extended such deference, then they would have had no objection to what Keir Starmer would have us believe was this civilian inaction.

Look out for more of this. The other frontbench and the Speaker's Chair will be on board in advance of all sorts of things, by no means only in foreign policy, and then who will ask anything awkward that anyone might notice very much or take seriously, and who will call anyone at all who might wish to pose such a question?

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.