On Target

18 of NATO's 31 member states meet the target of spending two per cent of GDP on defence only if you count things like military pensions, the Coast Guard, the Met Office, and the BBC World Service. Britain counts all of those, and only under David Cameron and George Osborne did it start to count Trident. Just think about that.

The only ever invocation of Article 5 had nothing to do with a threat or attack from Russia, which initially gave important assistance to NATO's side, and it ended in abject defeat after 20 years. Russia cannot even subdue Ukraine, as it would at least have any wish to do. It is a very bad joke to suggest that NATO has given its members peace. When was Britain, for one, last at peace?

People eyeing up employment by arms companies need to be honest about that, as do people who are already funded by them, as do people to whom the Armed Forces are the basis of their family and thus political identity, and as do those khaki festishists who have never been anywhere near the Forces but who are infatuated with them.

NATO is finished. Explicitly, if Donald Trump were re-elected. But implicitly, even if he were not. Facts must be faced. The Conservatives, Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the SNP all refuse to face facts. 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.