One Struggle

Whenever a Government takes powers to itself, then it gives them to its successors. The powers taken by Kenneth Baker were exercised by David Blunkett, the powers taken by Blunkett were exercised by Michael Gove, the powers taken by Gove are being exercised by Bridget Phillipson, and so on. European rearmament will arm in advance Marine Le Pen and Alice Weidel. But not Nigel Farage.

In Austria, the FPÖ has been kept out of office even though it came first and has been in government before. None of Farage's star vehicles has been in government, as all three of Labour, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats will still have been in the previous 15 years at the time of the next General Election. There is no suggestion of an overall majority for Reform UK, so if it came first, then ranks would close.

Moreover, all is not rosy in the garden of Reform. Rupert Lowe is frankly staging a Leadership challenge. Who knew that Lee Anderson would lack the authority to crack the Whip? The release of Stephen Yaxley-Lennon will bring matters to a head. Farage and Richard Tice want nothing to do with him or his followers. But Reform's core and target voters would walk over hot coals for him. Behind everything is the question of how Reform related to Donald Trump. Reform's definition of Brexit now includes a European Army. Did its members and supporters sign up for that? Would they literally sign up for it?

In whatever terms, Trump is openly talking directly to Hamas. Of course, that has always gone on. But remember what used to be said, and sometimes still is, about Jeremy Corbyn merely for having suggested the possibility of it as part of a broader approach. That is before we start about what was now happening in Syria. Or in Britain, for that matter. Before Corbyn's Leadership, those ghouls who were now calling for people to be tipped out of their wheelchairs could have been Labour MPs for anything between 20 and 50 years while everyone just assumed that they were the good guys, or at least well-meaning if naïve, because they were Labour. Corbyn gave them four and a half years to show the world who and what they really were. They are still doing it. They can no longer help themselves, if they ever could.

Today, they are calling for investment in the arms trade to be reclassified as ethical. Instead, lest intelligence, and more than intelligence, fall into enemy hands, BAE Systems should be renationalised as the monopoly supplier to our own Armed Forces, with a ban on all sale of arms abroad, and with a comprehensive programme of diversification in the spirit of the Lucas Plan. One of the signatories to those MPs' letter is the disgraced Lord McNicol of West Kilbride, who shares the red benches with Lord Dannatt. The arms trade actively corrupts the parliamentary process.

At least Trump is brazen. He wants Canada, Greenland, Gaza and Ukraine for their natural resources, and he wants those for himself, his family, his friends and his backers. Imagine that the East India Companies had been the British and Dutch Crowns, and vice versa. In that spirit, BlackRock is buying two major ports on the Panama Canal. The same BlackRock of which the German supervisory board was chaired until 2020 by Friedrich Merz. The CDU now has almost as little to do with German Christian Democracy as the Conservative Party has with Toryism. Angela Merkel's old seat has just been held for one term by a Social Democrat before passing to the AfD in the person of a former member of the youth organisation of the neo-Nazi NPD; he is only 31, so that is not ancient history. Such are the fruits of what my old friend James Doran dubbed "Pasokification". It is coming to Britain. Indeed, it is already here. Die Linke is well on the way down the same road, and on either side of the North Sea, the Greens are so gung-ho for war, which as much as anything else is massively polluting, that one cannot help wondering what they were so desperate to prove.

More joy in Heaven, but when are we who have held the line forever going to be allowed a hearing? Unlike Ash Sarkar, do we not go to the right dinner parties? Yet hope springs eternal. The great Eddie Dempsey has been elected General Secretary of the RMT. Dave Ward has been re-elected General Secretary of the CWU. The POA is ramping up its campaign to restore its members' right to strike. The Assisted Suicide Bill and the looming cuts to disability benefits are galvanising the disabled rights movement; that Bill should also be seen in the light of today's revelation that one in eight women killed by men were aged over 70. And the furore over the new sentencing guidelines exposes the fact that both the working class and "ethnic, cultural and faith minorities" (all religions are now minority religions, but the Sentencing Council does not seem to know) are more likely to be charged, more likely to be convicted, and more likely to be given harsher sentences for the same offences. Enclosure was financed by the slave trade. The military-industrial complex's cuts to overseas aid have taken less than a week to become cuts at home. It has always been One Struggle.