Beyond Parody, Beyond The Fringe

On a very backburner, I do have an idea for a fortnightly satirical magazine, but what could compare to real life? The Houthis tremble before us as HMS Queen Elizabeth has to pull out of the biggest NATO exercise in Europe since the end of the Cold War.

We have also not sent a frigate or a destroyer to the Falkland Islands since 2017, and we have now stopped doing so as a matter of policy due to no longer having any very much, leaving the place with an offshore patrol vessel that has one 30mm cannon, and with four Typhoon fighter jets, one of which is currently non-operational.

Meanwhile, Argentina is acquiring warships, submarines and fighter jets while its domestic situation is kicking off. We are stating that we would not bother a second time, because we could not bother a second time. Before such a Great Power, the Houthis quake as the Taliban did. Argentina, one should add, is the latest Fatherland of those who have needed one ever since the fall of Margaret Thatcher. Argentina. As it prepares to invade the Falkland Islands. Who could invent that?

We have had Nicola Sturgeon's waterworks, and her claim under oath immediately to have deleted messages that she had read out from her phone on television months after they had been sent. We have a Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland who not only did not contest the last Stormont elections, but appeared as a pundit on the BBC's results programme. We are not in the situation when Peter Robinson and Martin McGuinness ran Northern Ireland as a prominent member of Ulster Resistance, which to this day has never so much as declared a ceasefire, and as a serving member of the IRA Army Council, but the latest peace dividend comes pretty close to that.

The female First Minister and the female Deputy First Minister must be called to speak, and can be made to sit down and shut up, by the Speaker, who is a Protestant fundamentalist man. That does not feel like a coincidence. Those to whom that would have to be the case, and who certainly demand their own walled cities in which to teach Young Earth creationism, are supposedly the most British people in these Islands. Again, satirise that. I dare you to try.

Today, the Labour Party, or indeed anything or anyone at all, has managed to be outflanked on the left by Andrew Rawnsley. I mean, how could you make up anything to top that? It is matched, but no more than matched, by that party's proud announcement that its General Election manifesto will contain nothing to which the Conservative Party could possibly object, even though Labour not unfairly contends that the Conservatives are simply unfit for office. Yet it has given them an absolute veto over its own policy.

When did Keir Starmer ever say that he did want to abolish the House of Lords? On the contrary, he has expressed such confidence in his party's current and putative MPs that he openly intends to create 100 Peers in order to staff his Government. He clearly does not think much of the existing Labour Peers, but his solution is different ones, not a different House. And were we going to have a General Election about that, when we had people starving to death? Take anything in this paragraph, and then try and lampoon it. You can't, can you?

As is par for the course, the Government has already spent more on fighting the latest rail strike than it would have cost to have settled the dispute. As is par for the course, that approach enjoys the enthusiastic support of the Official Opposition. And as is par for the course, ASLEF is affiliated to the Labour Party, thereby funding its own oppression. Only the trade unions do this. All other money to Labour, like all money to the Conservatives, buys something specific.

That does not need to be very much money. It took only two million pounds for the bankers to buy a promise not to cap their bonuses. Rachel Reeves is herself a figure beyond parody, with her plagiarism, and with her denial of it in the form of a textbook definition of plagiarism. She will not have spoken in that ridiculous accent, RADA doing a fortnight's stint in EastEnders, when she was at the Bank of England, or when she was at the British Embassy in Washington. Nor would she as Chancellor of the Exchequer. Yet while she is in character, then she has gone full Method as a very, very, very cheap date.

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. It is time to restore seriousness.