In The Pipeline

So much for having to grow the economy before making spending commitments. If it is not the Conservatives expecting us to be pathetically grateful for zero economic growth because at least that is not a recession, then it is Labour claiming that there is no money for our own starving and freezing population, yet demanding that limitless sums be spent on Ukraine, dressed up as "defence" even though Ukraine is irrelevant to the defence of these Islands.

Mossad does not leak. It has made known what it has discovered about the scale of Ukrainian losses, and we should all pay attention. Elon Musk has restricted Ukraine's access to Starlink, so, based on cold calculation, even woke billionaire opinion is shifting. There is nothing very woke about Ukraine, and merely not being Russia is obviously no longer enough. Everyone is now talking, as some of us always have been, about Ukrainian corruption, about Ukrainian Nazism, about the bans on Opposition parties and on free media in Ukraine, about religious persecution there, about war crimes on both sides, about the role of NATO and EU expansion in fomenting this crisis, about the fact that this war had been going on for nine years, and about how any realistic alternative to Vladimir Putin would be even worse.

Next up, they will all be claiming that they had never ignored Seymour Hersh on the Nord Stream pipeline; everyone who is actively abusing him supported the Iraq War, which says all that needs to be said about them. And they will all be pretending that they had always said that the Wagner Group had no intention of ceding to the Russian Federation the territory that it had captured in Ukraine, or in Africa, or anywhere else, while Ukraine's calling in of Poland and Hungary would end in the Polish reunification of Galicia, in the Hungarian reincorporation of Carpathian Ruthenia, in the "reluctant" acceptance of existing losses to Russia or Wagner, and in the imposition of a NATO protectorate and an EU vassal in the form of a landlocked rump state around Kiev.

That state might even simply be called Kyiv, in the way that Luxembourg, the capital of which is also called Luxembourg, is called Luxembourg. But this one would be a bigger version of the NATO protectorate and EU vassal of Kosovo, which is the source of many of the illegal firearms on British streets, and which is a centre of heroin-trafficking and of the people-trafficking in which Ukraine is already globally important. For a quarter of a century, boys in the never unfailed state of Kosovo have been called Tonibler. No doubt boys in the never unfailed state of Kyiv will be called Borisjohnson. Or, if anything even worse, Keirstarmer.

But the opinion polls bear no resemblance to real votes cast. 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.