Tentacles

ACAB does not correspond to my experience. And as with Wayne Couzens before him, who do you think arrested David Carrick? But I have never had a colleague whose nickname at work was "Rapey", or "The Rapist", or anything like that. Have you? I never even came across nicknames of that kind in prison. Yet they seem to be, if not all that common within the Police, nevertheless clearly not all that unusual. The systemic and cultural problem cannot be denied.

Why does Nick Cohen himself not stand against Jeremy Corbyn at Islington North? As "Corbyn without the baggage", Christian Wolmar would presumably be refused ratification by the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party. Cohen has to keep up the absurd pretence, eight years old but no older than that, that Corbyn was some sort of made man of Hamas, Hezbollah, the IRA, and now no doubt of the Wagner Group and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps as well, so that no "moderate" Labour supporter of NHS privatisation and of Itamar Ben-Gvir "would dare" risk life and limb by putting up against him. Nothing to do with the guaranteed electoral humiliation, then. Over to you, Cohen. Your leaflets could show all of your opponent's unsavoury associates as the tentacles of Jeremy the Octopus. Keir Starmer would presumably be honoured and delighted to make the very short journey from Camden Town to campaign for you.

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.