Raise The Voice

More fool Mothin Ali for responding at all, never mind apologising. He and the Greens have paid the Danegeld, so now they will never get rid of the Dane. Councillor Ali's capitulation was particularly regrettable on the day of Shaima Dallali's victory over the National Union of Students, and behind it the "Campaign Against Antisemitism" of the discredited and disowned Gideon Falter.

As for the supposedly peaceable Greens, they support NATO and the war in Ukraine. They also used to want to ban halal meat until the Board of Deputies, making itself useful for once, pointed out that on the same principles they would also have had to have banned kosher meat. But that alone was why they changed tack. The signs were there. By the way, I have always wanted to try kosher meat. I was amazed to learn that there was no restaurant in Gateshead.

Is it because all media are now state-licensed, either by Ofcom or via the measures that have been adopted to stop anyone from saving the Daily Telegraph, that there is silence about the Israeli ban on Al Jazeera? Here is its documentary about the 7th October attacks. Please share that far and wide, along with The Labour Files, of which the third episode is The Hierarchy, about the hierarchy of racism in the Labour Party. That won the Gold Award for documentaries at the New York Festivals TV and Film Awards. Those awards, those festivals and that city may be many things, but they are not anti-Semitic. Although Keir Starmer presumably thinks that they are. As must the Green Party.

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. 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.