Demonstrably

Demonstrations in Iran and China are cheered on by the people who have made them illegal in Britain, by the people who have no intention of making them legal again in Britain, and by the people who have consciously chosen not to report those sorry facts.

China's heavy lockdown policy is regarded as a legitimate cause for protest, but Australia's heavy lockdown policy was not. Anti-lockdown protests in China, although tiny for the size of the country and of the cities in question, are given saturation coverage in Britain, where large anti-lockdown protests were repeatedly ignored by media on whose doorsteps they were being held.

The globally unparalleled repressiveness of the Chinese Communist Party is presented as manifest in its increasing moves towards the relaxation of Zero Covid, as sought by those who had felt the jackboot on their necks by being allowed to demonstrate noisily and in front of international media hostile to the regime.

And Xi Jinping is obviously on the way out, because that is the view of everyone who has been saying the same thing about Vladimir Putin, Bashar al-Assad, Nicolás Maduro, and a dozen others, for years on end.

Still, at least the British State has bought out the stake that the Chinese or any other foreign State should never have held in Sizewell C. There are rather a lot of other things that, for the sake of national security, also need to be brought back into public ownership. Just do not expect that case to be made by the Labour Party.

We are heading for a hung Parliament. 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.