All Put Together

You should be considered ineligible to be Prime Minister if you would press a nuclear button. In fact, you should be in a secure psychiatric institution. Would that there were any. Or much in the way of either criminal justice or healthcare at all. Defence? Defence of what? What do we have that is worth defending? And look at the Armed Forces, then tell me where the sixth highest "defence" spending in the world, for only the twenty-second highest population, was already going.

Still, Keir Starmer says that he can shake even more out of the Magic Money Tree that bears fruit for the arms companies, ever-generous political donors that they are. There seems to be very little expectation that they will supply much in the way of arms. Their foreign clients must pay more, but political cover at home does have to be bought. And it is. Well, who else is supposed to fund political parties? The dirty trade unions? Yet we are still stupid enough to do so, uniquely buying abuse rather than the influence that everyone else bought.

The other side remains open for business under a Leader who would not notice if the cost of its entire activity came out of his and his even richer wife's personal fortunes. The officially recognised insurgency, heavily publicised as such, is literally a limited company, which will decline to contest as many seats as it was paid enough to forego. It does not know whether its candidates are alive or dead, while its only MP, acquired by defection, castigates Care4Calais for "learning 'em how to speak English", and misspells his own name on his campaign leaflets. He was recently a Deputy Chairman of this country's governing party.

But I digress. Defence of what? What do we have that is worth defending? Every constituency saw an increase in sickness benefit claims last year, and while the highest absolute numbers were still in Labour areas, with the three highest increases all in Labour Coventry, the 12 next highest were Tonbridge and Malling, Hexham, Basingstoke, Ynys Môn, South Cambridgeshire, Pudsey, Haltemprice and Howden, Buckingham, Rugby, Milton Keynes South, Bolton North East, and Northampton South, Conservative all, and in several cases solidly so.

Those benefits are hard to get. For over a decade, I have been baffling GPs and hospital consultants with my inability to secure them, including the ones that allowed one to work as well. Anyone who can do so is ill. Millions of people are, and that is just the ones who can jump through the hoops. Remember that the people who decide these things, and who have no medical training, are paid by quota to fail a certain number, while there are other people in the system who are paid by quota to take a certain number of claimants off the books, which of course neither cures them nor finds them jobs.

This level of chronic illness is what comes of low pay, bad nutrition, poor housing, the inability to see a doctor or a dentist, and the hospital waiting lists that have trebled in the 14 years that the National Health Service has paid £150 billion to private healthcare providers, which are also generous contributors to politicians. When it is not dropping its commitment to abolish leasehold, then Labour is advocating even more of this provenly disastrous privatisation of the NHS. There is no "spare capacity" in British private healthcare. It is moonlighting NHS consultants meeting as much commercial demand as happened to present itself. Wes Streeting proposes only to present vastly more of that demand. He must be stopped.

The inability of the European Convention on Human Rights to stop any of this all the way back to Thatcherism and beyond, any more than the European Union ever did, is why I am profoundly sceptical of it. Though I say so myself, I am unusually aware of its reactionary origins. As an aside, neither the ECHR, nor what its licensed detractors would have one believe were age-old provisions peculiar to this Realm, prevented a judge from instructing a jury to "disregard" the concept of conviction beyond reasonable doubt in my case, nor is either of them preventing my ongoing persecution, the latest stage of which, after the comical failure to have me banged up in the early hours of the morning a few weeks ago, is to have tried to sign into my email account with false passwords so many times that it was currently out of action while it awaited "review". Emails will be answered when I have access to them. In the case of the prayer requests that I receive from all over the world, they will be offered generically until then.

Is the ECHR doing anything for Julian Assange? Is it stopping Germany from banning his comrade and mine, Yanis Varoufakis? Tony Blair changed only how the it was enforced in Britain, although it is important that he did. Britain had been subject to it since it had come into force anywhere, on 3rd September 1953, when Winston Churchill was Prime Minister. Far from its never having been intended to apply in Britain, this was the country where Churchill and David Maxwell Fyfe, whom Priti Patel and Suella Braverman would wish that they were if they had ever heard of him, most feared the post-War social democracy that they had drafted the ECHR to arrest and, where possible, reverse by means of judicial activism. Which British Government's assault on civil liberties has it ever prevented? For that, you need MPs such as the ones who blocked Blair's attempt to allow 90-day detention without charge, again apparently no breach either of the ECHR or of Josiah Bounderby's "the Royal arms, the Union-Jack, Magna Charta, John Bull, Habeas Corpus, the Bill of Rights, An Englishman's house is his castle, Church and State, and God save the Queen, all put together". How many such MPs would there be today?

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.

I have no plan to join the Workers Party of Britain, although nor would I expect to stand against it. If, however, it did not contest North Durham, then I would. 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. We have made a start.