Limited, Necessary and Proportionate

Rishi Sunak, Keir Starmer and Joe Biden are one of those things, anyway. Sunak should come here occasionally, so that we could have the extra £2.5 billion that have been announced for Ukraine to coincide with his little excursion. Apparently, it is largely for drones. You can buy an awful lot of drones with £2.5 billion. Sunak could also settle the junior doctors' dispute for two thirds of the cost of renting the Bibby Stockholm, a 48-year-old engineless barge that cannot be worth more than a few million pounds. Anyone would think that his relatives, friends and donors were cashing in on an enormous scale. Although I am bewildered at the existence of donors to the Conservative Party when its Leader could pay for an entire General Election campaign out of his own pocket and not even notice.

Speaking of the Bibby Stockholm, the people who spend the rest of their time bewailing the failure of the British Government to control the English Channel now imagine and insist that it could take charge of the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, along with a Biden Administration that they denounce for its inability to control the borders of the United States.

In cheering on this latest money-burning bit of derring-do, the Labour Party confirms beyond doubt its indifference towards, for example, the fact that most key National Health Service targets have been missed for at least seven years and that quite a few of them have never been met. Instead of giving England the same free dental check-ups as the rest of the United Kingdom, it wants to "hold the door open" to the privatisation of the NHS here, although nowhere else, while supervising the tooth-cleaning of children, a caricature of Blairism such as Armando Iannucci could never have devised.

But even compared to NHS privatisation, for the persons, relatives, friends and donors of politicians, there is no payday like a war. What we saw last night in Yemen were two countries bombing a third country because it was blockading shipping to a fourth country. Blockading shipping. That was it. Only last night did anyone die. Straits are not the high seas, and are not governed by the principle of freedom of navigation, but by that of innocent passage. Although the precise form of words has been avoided, numerous recent utterances of Antony Blinken and David Cameron have rendered it impossible for them to argue that that principle applied to supplies to Israel under the present circumstances. No one else has been targeted even to the limited extent that anyone has. Most of the major shipping companies had already stopped using the Red Sea largely or entirely.

After last night, Britain and the United States cannot any longer claim innocent passage through the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, either. That any case, however contemptible, can be made for this action raises the question of the success or otherwise of nuclear deterrence. As we spend between one and two million dollars per shot against whatever scrap of dirt last hosted the launch of a drone, then will the next stage be to nuke it? In effect, we are probably already deploying weapons of mass destruction, since the only things of any note that the Saudis could find to bomb in Yemen were the water treatment plants, thereby unleashing a cholera outbreak that remains the world's worst man-made health disaster. If we are doing the same, then how are we not engaged in biological warfare? What else is there to bomb in Yemen?

Zaydism parted from the main Shia body a very long time ago, so the Houthis' relationship with Iran is only marginally, if at all, more strategic, tactical and even opportunistic than that of Hamas. There is little or none of the real fellow-feeling that there is between Iran and Hezbollah, Twelvers both, although like everyone else to whom it applies they do not like that word. They and the Ismaili incorporated all sorts of things from the mass conversions of Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians, Hindus and others, often as a way of becoming Muslim while still snubbing the oppressive Sunni Caliphs. But the Zaydi stayed in Yemen and in what is now the adjacent part of Saudi Arabia. Their relative similarity to the Sunni is therefore universally observed. Indeed, they are often more rationalistic and more tolerant of internal pluralism, certainly by comparison with the Wahhabi. As even Oman, practically a GCHQ colony and the last princely state of the British Empire, condemns this bombing, then brush up on Ibadism next. "You read it here first, as you often do," I wrote on 31st December.

And how is the Houthi control of access to the Red Sea an economic problem to two Western countries, but not to any of the others? Still, our lords and masters had been gasping for a way to blame the war in Gaza for Britain's economic problems, and with them their refusal to countenance any domestic measure that might make life slightly more bearable because "we can't afford it". They had tried Brexit, as if every other country in the world were in the EU. They had tried Covid-19, as if that had happened nowhere else. They had tried the war in Ukraine, as if only Britain had been in any way affected by it. They are happy bunnies today, the Government and the Official Opposition alike.

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 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.