Not A Weak Week

One week ago, on the anniversary of the fall of the Ottoman Caliphate, there was an enormous explosion in Istanbul. The Turkish Government refused to accept the condolences of the United States. Turkey has been blocking Swedish and Finnish accession to NATO, and facilitating the transportation of Russian oil and gas. The huge story of this bombing has mysteriously gone away. For now.

By the middle of the week, the Ukrainians had messed up their false flag bombing of Poland, so NATO had come up with a cover story that of course no one believed, but to which Zelensky did not even have the good manners to stick. Exasperation with him began to show. Uncomfortable facts about his regime began to be mentioned even in refined salons. Some of us had been mentioning them for quite a while.

And by the end of the week, the Swedish prosecutor had confirmed that traces of explosives had been found where the Nord Stream pipelines had clearly been sabotaged. "It's done," Liz Truss had texted Antony Blinken immediately after that attack. The Russians had been hacking her phone, because of course they had, so they had known from the start about our act of war, not only against them, but also against the NATO member states of Germany, Denmark, Norway, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, as well as against Sweden and Finland. We have not heard the last of that. From any of them.

Echoing the suggestion that the Russians were and are shelling themselves inside Europe's largest nuclear power plant at Zaporizhzhia, you either believe that Russia sabotaged the two Nord Stream pipelines, which it could just have turned off, or you do not. That division will be definitive for decades to come, as we are all expected to bear any burden and pay any price rather than be conquered by a Russian Army that had no Non-Commissioned Officers, the intermediate tier without which no organisation can function, and which could not even subdue Ukraine.

Behind all of this is the recently inaugurated BRICS+ Dialogue with Argentina, Egypt, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Thailand, and the United Arab Emirates. If we would not have picked some of those partners, then it is very telling that they have accepted the invitation. In addition to Egypt and the UAE, Bangladesh and Uruguay are already members of the BRICS New Development Bank. Afghanistan, Algeria, Iran, Mexico, Nicaragua, Pakistan, Sudan, Syria, Turkey and Venezuela are also actively interested in BRICS alignment, while the unfolding General Election results in Malaysia are potentially epoch-making.

In such a world as this, it is no wonder that even Joe Biden has reiterated the One China policy, adding, "I do not think there's any imminent attempt on the part of China to invade Taiwan." We all know what that means. Now he needs to explain the aid to Ukraine that was laundered back to the Democratic Party, including his own campaign, through FTX. And we in Britain need to keep out our own Crazies, whether the ones who were previously around Liz Truss, or the ones who are still around Keir Starmer.

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.