Legal But Harmful

As Damian Green is appointed to chair the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, consider that the effusions of Andrew Tate might have far less influence if they came instead from Green, as they perfectly well might. Hey, ho, no one could possibly take the Online Safety Bill seriously if he had anything to do with it, so there is that.

Pornography, capitalism's biggest industry and purest form, does of course provide the background to the deplorable behaviour of Benjamin Mendy, but there is no law against that behaviour, for all the hounding of him by the bitter blue-collar lawyers of the CPS, who could not make it in any field of law that paid better.

A conviction by a majority verdict is by definition not a conviction beyond reasonable doubt, a concept that jurors are in any case now directed to "disregard" without anything so vulgar as an Act of Parliament. Disregard any conviction, either by such a verdict, or where the jury had been so directed.

False allegations of sexual assault are so rare that every male from puberty upwards either knows or is someone to whom it has happened. If your husband, boyfriend or son has not told you that, then he has just not told you. It was Keir Starmer who devised the "believe the victim" policy, although he cannot define a woman.

But Starmer's dishonesty is becoming a story. He lied to his party members to get their votes, so he would lie to anyone else to get their votes. 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.