Openly

The Jewish Establishment has been fairly muted about Gideon Falter, being clearly well used to him and his antics. Look up the astonishing case of Rowan Laxton. After months of claiming that it was unsafe to visit Central London on a Saturday, Falter and his entourage of bodyguards and a cameraman decided to walk home from synagogue (which one?) by a route that apparently compelled them to cross the road directly into the huge and peaceful ceasefire march, many participants in which loudly and proudly announced their Jewishness.

The Police spotted Falter because he was a well-known troublemaker, for all that he was wearing something that he had rarely or never worn in the street in the past. In an exchange rather more of which has appeared on Sky News and elsewhere through today, putting a very different complexion on the matter, one of the Police did deploy an unfortunate turn of phrase, for which he will have to pay some sort of price, thereby giving an insight into the Met's relationship with racialised communities in general. Anyone who was remotely surprised exposed only their privilege.

And not only the Met. Black protestors are routinely arrested at white supremacist marches, which by the way invariably feature Israeli flags. The Police strip-search 60 children per week, overwhelmingly black, Asian or mixed-race, since we all know what "Not Specified" is designed to mask. 21 per cent of the children strip-searched even in Sussex were recorded as black, where only two per cent of the population is black, and fewer than half were from the white 90 per cent. The suggestion that a member of no other ethnic minority would have been treated as Falter was should at best be laughed to scorn. A boy spent Purim wandering around Stamford Hill in an IDF uniform and carrying a toy gun. A black boy who did anything comparable, or a boy who either was or "looked" Muslim, would be lucky if the Armed Response Unit did not leave him dead on the street.

Anyone from those worlds knows that demanding that the Metropolitan Police Commissioner resign or be dismissed is overplaying your hand, as do things like the Board of Deputies. If your cheerleader is Suella Braverman, backed as ever by the likes of "Tommy Robinson", then it is not looking good for you. Braverman incited "Robinson" and his mob to riot at the Cenotaph on Armistice Day, stabbing the Police. But well beyond that sort, there is profound annoyance that the ceasefire marches have been so big, so lacking in incident, and unbanned despite a very clear order to ban them, issued by people whom Jeremy Corbyn allowed to get used to their own way. To Falter, these are "lawless mobs" because, by existing, they dare to disobey him. Look at his face in that footage. Listen to his tone of voice both there and on the radio. Watch him try to barge past the Police, for which you or I would have been arrested. He really does think that he owns Britain, or at least London, which he sees as the same thing.

Yet while no chickens should be counted, we have in recent days showed signs of fighting back against the noisiest self-appointed bullies within a half of one per cent of the population. They are not going down without a fight, and nor will Falter and his ilk. But we are up for both fights. 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. 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.