No Heart of Stone Here

"Bomb them back to the Stone Age," you have gleefully demanded for more than 20 years. You were not able to do that to Iraq, or to Libya, or to Syria, as you would not be able to do it to Iran. Try as you might, even Afghanistan could not quite have that done to it.

But the invasion that you spent a decade applauding, arming and directing has already left Yemen with the worst humanitarian crisis in the world (yes, at least in terms of sheer numbers, still even including Gaza), and with nowhere left to which be bombed except, pretty much, back to the Stone Age. That bombing has begun. The war in Gaza has escalated, because Britain and the United States have escalated it.

Hamas is bad, and Israel's arguments to that effect at The Hague in a few hours' time will be immaterial to its case, since the other side has already said that in no uncertain terms. The Taliban are bad. Saddam Hussein was bad. Gaddafi was bad.  Assad is bad, although his enemies are even worse. The Houthis are bad, likewise, since the ones remaining are mostly the same as his. That has never been what this was about. And in their action in support of Gaza, which is at worst no more interference than European and American support for Israel, the Houthis have not killed a British or American citizen. In that action, they have not killed anyone. But they will now.

Kosovo, Sierra Leone (what good did it do?), Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Ukraine, Gaza, Yemen again: we have never been wrong, and that list is not exhaustive. Our position always turns out to have been the position of those who knew what they were talking about. Listen to us on Lebanon. Listen to us on Taiwan. Just listen to us.

Thankfully, 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.