No One Is Buying At The Berger Bar

Many thanks to everyone who has been in touch to check that I was fit and well in view of the silence on here in recent days. I am happy to confirm that I have not been better in many, many years. In my absence, I trust that you have all been enjoying the best marketing ploy in ages, the pretence that Roald Dahl's books were going to be rewritten. Both versions will now be published. And both with sell healthily. As has always been the intention.

Now, back to business as usual. They'll wish they'd given us tomatoes when we start pelting them with turnips. And by "them", I mean all of them. Say what you like about Tony Blair, but his pledges were specific policies. Keir Starmer's "missions" are vague, vacuous bilge. Moreover, everyone knows that he is not a man whose word is to be trusted, and even BBC interviews are now so impertinent as to say so.

Not that anyone at all picked him up on his astonishing assertion that the NHS had to be privatised because of Ukraine. Yes, Starmer really did say that. Like "Covid" and "Brexit", "Ukraine" is now the excuse for absolutely everything. See instead Paul Knaggs here and here, Thomas Fazi and Peter Hitchens well and truly getting the better of the debate here, Fiona Hill setting Freddie Sayers and everyone else straight here, and George Galloway delivering the anti-war speech of the present era here. Knowing that George was going to deliver that, Ben Wallace, who like Starmer enjoys prancing around in military fancy dress, did not turn up. A lady whom I did not know from Adam stopped me in the street in Durham on Friday and asked me when I was going to post it on here. I am delighted to oblige.

Recent days have seen good publicity for the four-day week and for universal free broadband. An editorial in The Guardian, which did more than any other publication to bring down the man who had brought those ideas into the mainstream, more or less admitted that he had never been an anti-Semite after all. What next, some examination as to who the members of the Equality and Human Rights Commission had been, and who had appointed them?

There was a bit of foot-stamping on the letters page, but while I have always been the first to criticise Jeremy Corbyn's appeasement of them, the likes of Julia Neuberger, Simon Sebag Montefiore, Mike Katz, the EHRC, the Board of Deputies and The Guardian have to face up to what they have inflicted on Britain because, while they had not particularly wished to be governed by either semidetached or country house Tories with whom they had felt little social or cultural affinity, they had far more strongly not wanted to pay tax, least of all to elevate the condition of the beastly little common people, some of them Negro. The Guardian, at least, may have begun the journey, although in that case, then it could do with sacking Rafael Behr, and with giving due coverage to The Labour Files and to the Forde Report.

"Labour anti-Semitism" made no electoral difference, except insofar as the party staffers behind the hoax threw the 2017 General Election so as to prevent their own party, their employer, from being the largest in that hung Parliament. The 2019 Election would not have happened if Corbyn had not capitulated to Starmer over Brexit. The Election early in 2022 would, again, have delivered a hung Parliament with Labour as the largest party. Heaven knows what would have happened then, but that would have been the result. People whose gender identity does not conform to their biological sex are half of one per cent of the population, and so are Jews. Think on.

Anything up to half of British Jews do not agree with the interfering Israeli Embassy, the Chief Rabbinate, the Senior Rabbinate, the Board of Deputies, the Jewish Leadership Council, the Campaign Against Antisemitism, the Community Security Trust, The Jewish Chronicle, the Jewish Telegraph, and the Jewish News. Most of Britain's very few Jews have voted Conservative for decades, even when the Leader of the Labour Party has been Jewish, and most of the rest will have supported Corbyn if only for the want of anyone more left-wing, so Starmer will already have lost Labour more Jewish voters than he might ever have hoped to gain it. He has certainly expelled more Jews from the Labour Party than all previous Leaders put together.

Such is the party that Luciana Berger has been permitted to re-join barely three years after she stood against it at a General Election. All the people cited as martyrs of the Corbyn years were and are thoroughly unimpressive. Berger had danced around a room in Parliament as she had watched Palestinian children being bombed, but her disregard for her constituents had exhausted the patience of the Constituency Labour Party on which she had been imposed as her reward for having taken the virginity of Tony Blair's eldest son, so she responded to imminent deselection by screaming, "Hitler! Hitler!"

Until Corbyn had arranged for her to be made a Dame, then Louise Ellman had been most notable for the fact that at the low turnout General Election of 2001, the constituency that had reelected her had had the lowest turnout in the entire country. In 22 years in Parliament, what did she do? List her accomplishments. Ruth Smeeth managed to lose her seat to Jonathan Gullis before taking a peerage at the age of 43 rather than dare face him again at the ballot box.

And Dame Margaret Hodge was and is a tax-avoiding squillionaire who has hated Corbyn ever since he stood up to her over the rampant child abuse in Islington's children's homes when she was the Leader of the Council. She filed hundreds of complaints of anti-Semitism by Labour members, 90 per cent of which turned out to be against people who were not party members at all, yet she called at least one Corbyn-supporting party member "a second class Jew".

They have got their party back, and they are welcome to it. The opinion polls bear no resemblance to real votes cast, and in any case even the Labour poll lead has halved since Rishi Sunak took over. Halved. The Labour vote has gone through the floor at all but one by-election since Starmer became Leader, with one of those recording Labour's lowest ever share of the vote. Council seats that were held or won under Corbyn have fallen like sandcastles, taking control of major local authorities with them. That is the bread and butter of the party's right wing, who are not otherwise the most employable of people.

With nearly two years still to go until the next General Election, Starmer's personal rating is negative not only nationally, but in every region apart from London, and it is still in decline. 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.