National Security?

The main parties are running the two worst British General Election campaigns since the War. It is a thing of beauty, really. On social media, candidates post campaign trail photographs of themselves with half a dozen paid staff, paid councillors, and councillors' relatives. Organisationally, the parties are effectively defunct. At nine o'clock tomorrow evening, if The Great British Sewing Bee were too exciting for you after Springwatch, then you could watch Rishi Sunak "versus" Keir Starmer. On Friday, there is to be some sort of event among invitees who all agreed with what was, from their own point of view, the lost war in Ukraine, which has long arrived at exactly the stalemate that that link predicted two years ago.

I know how it could be done legislatively, and I would do it. But Kemi Badenoch has spent all day demonstrating no such understanding, and the Conservatives have had long enough to do something about the definition of sex, which was not an issue before they returned to office. In the midst of a cost of living crisis, the only people who might go over to the Conservatives because of this are a minority of middle-aged, middle-class, Labour Rightish, overwhelmingly white women. Even most middle-aged, middle-class, Labour Rightish, overwhelmingly white women are on the other side, unless you had missed who ran the charities sector, the cultural sector, university administration, and the humanities side of academia.

Considering the position that that demographic as a whole has taken on Gaza, and these are the people expelling student protesters or arranging to have them beaten up, then the loss of any part of it to the Conservatives or to anyone else ought to be welcomed by the Labour Party, which ought to pity the Conservative Party on having become the new home of those who had been all in favour of identity politics when it was just hatred of men in general, and of working-class and black men in particular. Of course, Labour will take no such view. But most of that subculture is aggressively in favour of gender self-identification, as its party will therefore remain.

Speaking of identity politics, khaki fetishists have been declared electorally decisive despite being even fewer in number than the half of one per cent of the population that was either Jewish, and by no means all of which agreed with the war in Gaza, or of a professed gender identity different from its sex. If it is not National Service, then it is Starmer's banana republic event today. When he says "national security", then which nation does he mean? Ukraine, which is an irrelevance to that of the United Kingdom? There is talk of giving the position of Secretary of State for Defence to Baroness Anderson, the former Ruth Smeeth MP, previously notable only for having lost her seat to Jonathan Gullis. But even she does not know whether the nation that she would be securing would be the United States or Israel.

Starmer's parade of bemedalled candidates, a most un-British practice, who were in some cases serving military officers as recently as last week, needs to be asked about the use of a British weapon to murder, clinically, three British veterans who were engaged in the classic combination of intelligence work and aid work, and who in the latter capacity had to be killed pursuant to Starmer's televised demand for Gaza to be starved. Sadly, both NATO and Trident were in both of Jeremy Corbyn's General Election manifestos, although it is true that he never said that he would use a nuclear weapon. Anyone who says that, belongs in a secure psychiatric institution. There is only one country where that question is even asked, and even here it is tellingly only ever asked of the Leader of one party. NATO membership keeps British military personnel subject to officers who were themselves answerable to Viktor Orbán and to Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. If Starmer's new recruits were happy with that, then they make Natalie Elphicke look like Diane Abbott. We seem to go to war an awful lot for a country whose potential enemies were supposedly so deterred.

Starmer does not say when he hoped to reach 2.5 per cent of Gross Domestic Product, but with only the twenty-second largest population in the world, Britain is already the sixth highest spender on "defence". Yet our Armed Forces are so tiny, so badly paid, and so badly equipped, that even when you remembered that we counted things like military pensions, the Coast Guard, the Met Office, and the BBC World Service, then someone is still getting paid on an enormous scale, before kicking back some of that to politicians. With an eye on their next employment, of course the likes of Ben Wallace and the top brass want even more. They know where it is going. As do the kind of people whose midcareer is as Labour Defence Ministers.

Or as Liberal Democrat Environment Ministers, which there have been more recently than it feels. The Lib Dems' water policy is pitiful. The water companies ought either to be allowed to go bust, or they should be fined into bankruptcy, and in either case they should be renationalised for nothing. Privatised water is a mad idea, to rank with the ability to go bankrupt while running a water company. But no national asset is safe with the Lib Dems. While the Conservatives and Labour had both tried and failed to privatise the Royal Mail, it was a Lib Dem who did it, leading to its purchase by a foreign oligarch on condition of the abolition of the universal service obligation.

How about that for taking back control, Nigel Farage? Is Corbyn still suing you? And how could Donald Trump hope to win without you? Still, at least Reform UK has a candidate here at North Durham. That is more than can be said for the Conservative Party, which has councillors here, and which took 13,897 votes here in 2019, even before Lanchester had been moved into the constituency. Also in 2019, Laura Pidcock lost North West Durham. Unlike her, Ben Sellers has never got over it. It is time for him to substantiate his claims that I had blogged on this site that she, he and Daniel Kebede were members of a terrorist cell, and that I had written to Durham Police, Guido Fawkes and Jeremy Corbyn to accuse Ben and others of being members of Mossad and MI5.

Whoever the Workers Party candidate here is, and no one has ever heard of him, does he want to be associated with such as that? Nor could anyone on the Left share with Ben any major or many minor disagreements with me without also disagreeing in the same terms with George Galloway, with whom I agree vastly more than I do with Ben. The Workers Party is standing only because Luke Akehurst is, whereas my candidacy has nothing to do with any other. Please contact davidaslindsay@hotmail.com, including if you might be able to help with money. But I will be on that ballot paper, come what may.

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. YouGov's predicted Labour overall majority of 194 is already less than two thirds of the figure that was being predicted by the pollsters at the weekend, and it would require Labour to take Jacob Rees-Mogg's seat. That is not going to happen.

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.