Widely Thought To Have Been Carried Out

Israel should be treated as if it were any other country. But unlike any other country, Israel could use a British-made weapon to bomb the House of Commons while it was in session and only George Galloway would object, although not on the floor of the House, where he would never be called. Nor would he be allowed on any radio or television station, or quoted in any newspaper apart from the Morning Star. Everyone else would parrot whatever codswallop the Israelis had dictated. This we know, because that has already happened in relation to the murders of James Henderson, John Chapman and James Kirby.

Less than two weeks after that, the RAF has been shooting down drones on behalf of the murderers of those British citizens, who were military veterans. Yet it had apparently been unable to shoot down the drone that had killed them in three attacks of surgical precision to rank with the elimination of Ismail Haniyeh's three sons and four grandchildren. Or with the bombing of the Iranian consulate in Damascus, which is now almost comically said by the BBC to be "widely thought to have been carried out" by the IDF, as if anyone else might have done it. The line is also being peddled that that might not have been a diplomatic mission at all, as if the Israelis, or whoever it had been, had just got lucky in hitting exactly the eight Revolutionary Guard Corps officers for whom they had been aiming. Who would have known that they might have been there? The IDF's dumb luck on occasions such as the Damascus consulate-or-whatever, the Haniyehs, and the British and other aid workers, ranks only with its toddler-like imprecision the rest of the time, so many women and children are we expected to believe that it killed accidentally or collaterally.

Ostensible conservatives or socialists turn into Hillary Clinton when asked in what way Israel was a British ally, holding forth about freedom 'n' democracy as if those constituted a military alliance or a strategic interest. Like Clinton, they are in any case utter hypocrites. They would presumably accept the ratings of Freedom House. In the air last night, effectively against Partly Free Lebanon, were the key British ally of Not Free Jordan, with Not Free Iraq, and with very, very, very Not Free Saudi Arabia. Whatever, by their own lights, they were defending, then it was not freedom or democracy. How did the Iraq War for those work out? Well, that assumes that it was ever really for those in the first place. Unfree and undemocratic Iraq's planes would not have gone into battle for Israel before then. But they did last night. As did those of Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia.

Retaliation is not self-defence, even if few would doubt that Britain would do it to anywhere, at least other than Israel, that had bombed its diplomatic territory in a third country, causing the deaths of British citizens. It would be wrong. But it would probably happen. There would be no doubt what the Americans would do under comparable circumstances. Iran's overtly retaliatory action has killed no one, unlike its provocation, and that cannot be entirely due to the success of its opponents. Anything more from Israel would be for Benjamin Netanyahu's internal political purposes only, and worthy of contempt.

As victims of the Manchester Arena attack prepare to sue MI5, we told you for years, and years, and years that successive British Governments had turned Manchester into the world centre of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, to the point of dispatching the Royal Navy as its ferry service. We were right all along about Libya, just as we were right about Kosovo, about Sierra Leone (where the best that can be said is that British military intervention did no good), about Afghanistan, about Iraq, and about Syria. We are being proved right about Ukraine, and we have now been proved right repeatedly about Yemen, where it turns out that Joe Biden has been desperately suing for peace with the Houthis. We shall be proved right about this, too, because why would we be wrong this once? Will it take that Israeli bombing of Parliament to vindicate us? Or would not even that work?

This Blairite hegemony is all the stranger and sadder for the fact that having been born less than two months apart in 1980, two of Britain's most prominent politicians were first time voters in 2001, the high water mark of Tony Blair, yet Rishi Sunak had been Head Boy of Winchester, while Angela Rayner had left school with literally nothing fully five years earlier, and was to make her way through her trade union. Make what you will of either of those backstories, but the fact that those are Generation Blair's leading figures makes Blairism a failure in its own terms. Yet there seems to be no getting rid of it.

As in 1997, the frontman does not quite put the lower into lower middle class. Most people would assume the factory and the land to have been in Keir Starmer’s family for 100 years by the time of his birth in 1962, and his Sir to be one of those Victorian or Edwardian industrial baronetcies. After the First World War, those Liberal dynasties went two ways, often within the same family, and the Starmers, it would be supposed, became Fabians. A private school, but not one of those. An Oxbridge degree, if only eventually, although Leeds also has quite a posh side, both as a city and as a university. The Bar, which is always popular with that sort. A constituency named after two Tube stations. It all makes such perfect sense that there is no reason to look too hard.

Just as Keir Starmer has never sought to outargue the Labour Left politically or philosophically, but has instead deployed the Rule Book to kick it out from Jeremy Corbyn down, so as Prime Minister he would seek to restore as much as possible of the order that obtained between Blair and Brexit, much of which in fact pre-dated 1997 and most of which is still in place on paper, while simply criminalising in law and in practice anything like the dissent from it that first seriously manifested itself with the emergence of Corbyn in the summer of 2015, before exploding in, as and from the 2016 referendum result.

Vast areas of public policy, including the National Health Service in the form of a "Mission Delivery Board", would be handed over to heavenly bodies that it would be illegal to attempt to influence. For example, the Office for Value for Money would be the last nail in the coffin of democratic political control over economic policy, while Community Payback Boards would deliver professional-managerial class justice in the raw, and those two changes would not be coincidental. Starmer is completely open about all of this. As with Wes Streeting and NHS privatisation, believe him.

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 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.