Shipping Forecast

If the Houthis have been attacking shipping that had nothing to do with Israel, then whose shipping has that been? When have they been attacking it? Why would they? Neither Britain nor the United States claims that any of its own vessels has been attacked, while no other Western country even sees the problem, not even those which had previously signed up to giving the Houthis a jolly good talking to. Likewise, Bahrain, which had also signed up to that, has joined every other Arab country in staying out of this.

That includes several of Britain's closest allies from the most hardboiled realist point of view. For if this is not a neoconservative war of liberal intervention, then someone needs to tell the neocons and the liberal interventionists, who are thoroughly gung-ho for it, and in the form of the Biden Administration are its principal prosecutors, with the only other participant's Prime Minister paying court in and to Ukraine hours after the bombing of Yemen.

While American Republicans would of course support the war in Ukraine under a Republican President, and will support it if and when it continued under one, British Conservatives and Labour Rightists are like the Democrats that they would all be in the United States, in that they reflexively support any and every war from the moment that it is first suggested, whether or not that they have ever previously heard of the country in question. You could make one up and then set them tweeting furiously for a war.

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.