Making NICE

I am only three years younger than Muqtada al-Sadr, so I had better start planning my retirement. I just need to stage a failed coup first. What a thing it must be to live in Iraq, where having done that, then you just got to retire. How delightfully civilised.

Maintaining a private army called the Peace Companies, noted for its use of IEDs with infrared sensors as triggers, would be quite delicious. The associated political party is called the National Independent Cadres and Elites, which also has a certain ring to it. NICE. What else, for the Peace Companies?

But who wants a failed coup at the moment? Britain stands closer to the Revolution even than in the immediate aftermath of the First World War. Lenin said that there would never be a physical force revolution in Britain, because eventually the British would just vote for it all, anyway. Accordingly, his would-be executors in this country, of whom I am certainly not one, have almost always preferred elections to insurrections as a matter of principle.

In any case, to suggest that any of their organisations existed to lead the Great Revolt of the Proletariat would be like suggesting that the St John Ambulance existed to recapture the Holy Land from the Infidel. Rather, they now find themselves campaigning for economic policies that have overwhelmingly popular support, and for not unconnected foreign policies that very soon will have.

Yet how are we to vote for those policies? This time last week, Labour's outright rejection of the renationalisation of rail, mail, energy and water put it in the most right-wing fifth of the population. It now puts Labour in the most right-wing eighth, and that is before the weather turns cold. Renationalisation would be far cheaper than anything else that was being proposed, and unlike them it would last forever. Do not bet against the Conservatives' doing it. With a Labour three-line whip to vote against. As the Queen Mother used to say, such fun.

We Cadres and Elites need to be ready to hold the balance of power in the next Parliament, without any sense of particular loyalty to any major party, nor any inherent squeamishness about any of them. They will all have been in government in the previous 20 years, they have all been rubbish, and they will all be led by people who had either been in those Governments or regarded them as the template. We have to be ready, willing and able to get whatever we could out of any of them as the situation presented itself, without fear or favour. If the DUP could do it, then so can we. Therefore, we must.