Blood Brothers?

Destruction of evidence, you say? Durham Police now has conclusive proof that the person who lied to send me to prison, and who has lied again to bring about the farcical but ongoing attempt to send me back there, has also done precisely that. Those in possession of all relevant material include the Police and Crime Commissioner, with whom I used to be a hospital governor, and my Member of Parliament, who is a Cabinet Minister, as well as a number of local, regional and national journalists. Plus the Crown Prosecution Service. And the Church, of course, which would not lie about something like this in general, but least of all for that person, whose nearest thing to an ecclesiastical protector, himself a thoroughly disreputable character, has in any case just died. It's over. It is over, and I have won.

The statement by all parties that full compensation of the victims of the contaminated blood scandal would cost whatever it cost is a rare admission in so many words that as a sovereign state with its own free-floating, fiat currency, the United Kingdom has as much of that currency as it chooses to issue to itself, with the fiscal and monetary means to control inflation, means that therefore need to be under democratic political control in both cases. If it can be bought in the pound sterling, then, as the sovereign issuer of the pound sterling, the British State can afford it. Yet on democratic political control of monetary policy, Labour has today been outflanked on the left by the Conservative Way Forward Group, although that Group can say in all fairness that Margaret Thatcher never did surrender that control.

And for buttons, although of course including kickbacks, Wes Streeting wants to sell England's National Health Service to the American private companies that had sold it contaminated blood products. Oh, for an adult relationship with the United States, such as many other countries do enjoy. Although today has been a good day for that. Up to a point. Rebecca Joynes, convicted of sex with two of her 15-year-old pupils, is on bail, even though it was when she was bailed for sex with the first one that she seduced the second and got pregnant by him. Yet convicted of nothing in Britain (and of nothing more than hacking in Australia, where he learned the lesson that many of us have learned about being deceived into a guilty plea), Julian Assange is still in Belmarsh, which is clearly killing him. That it should kill him would seem to be the purpose. But being half-dead means that he is hardly a flight risk. When in much better health, he was only ever one of those over the Swedish "rape" allegation, of which the less said, the better.

Still, today's ruling was welcome as far as it went, and they do say that good things come in threes. Today has also been the day that Jacob Zuma has been found constitutionally ineligible to stand for Parliament, a story that is one of many reasons to look forward to the election of Andrew Feinstein at Holborn and St Pancras, and the day that the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, the magnificently British Karim Khan KC, has applied for arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu, Yahya Sinwar, Yoav Gallant, Ismail Haniyeh and Mohammed Deif. So what that Israel is not a party to the ICC, something that speaks for itself? Tellingly, nor is either Russia or Ukraine. It is good to see the mask of "the rules-based international order" slip. You cannot seriously be proposing to vote for Joe Biden now, can you? Or for Keir Starmer, who expressly defended Israel's "right" to impose the "starvation as a method of warfare" for which Netanyahu and Gallant now face arrest, sending David Lammy out to do the rounds to repeat that obscenity? When Israel used a weapon from Britain to kill three British aid workers, then it was only giving effect to the British Labour Party policy that Gaza should be starved.

Such proponents of that as there are, were out on Saturday in the form of the tiny, screeching mob that the Police allowed at the Piccadilly Circus bottleneck due to pressure from the Government to provoke a confrontation with the entirely peaceful march for peace. Unlike the main demonstrators, that little gang usually assaults the Police, who therefore got off lightly this time. But if there were anything like that presence again, then the reason would be clear: the Government, under pressure from the loonies in and around its own party, had ordered the Police to create a confrontation, which there has only ever been from the supporters of Suella Braverman and "Tommy Robinson", who came equipped to stab the Police and who did so in some numbers, and from Gideon Falter, who also assaulted a Police Officer. Braverman was Home Secretary at the time of those stabbings, which she had incited. But if you rightly thought that that was bad, then imagine that Starmer were Prime Minister and that the Home Secretary were Yvette Cooper.

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.