British Mandate?

If Charlie and the Chocolate Factory were to be filmed again, then the Oompa Loompas might very well be British, or at least Dick Van Dyke Cockney. Hollywood initially made them a caricature of Hispanics, probably without even thinking about it, while early illustrations of the book made it clear that Roald Dahl himself saw them as African Pygmies. But either way, they were coolies from the Empire. And Britain is now Loompaland. Our American overlords do not fancy going ashore in Gaza, so we have to do it, because that is what we are for.

We already had people delivering aid, military veterans whose faces matched their WASP names and who, as is quite normal, were also working as intelligence operatives, competently fulfilling both tasks. The Israelis murdered them, faithful to the spirit of the King David Hotel bombing, of the Sergeants’ affair, of the attempted assassinations of Winston Churchill and Ernest Bevin, of Menachem Begin’s explicitly vengeful arming of Argentina during the Falklands War, and so on. The Americans understandably do not fancy the USS Liberty treatment from the land of Jonathan Pollard and from the heirs of those who sent letter bombs to the Truman White House. But even so.

Any Far Right rally in the world in the last 20 years has given full, flag-waving effect to the Haavara Agreement. Yet who in Parliament or Congress has heard of it? 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.

I have no plan to join the Workers Party of Britain, although nor would I expect to stand against it. But if 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. But there does need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not. We have made a start.