The First League of Armed Neutrality

Last night in Durham, I heard Peter Hitchens on Ukraine. He was on magnificent form, and the Palace Green Debating Chamber, for those who know, was packed to the rafters, mostly with the young men who are expected to fight wars. A posher than average crowd, by and large, but that sort does its bit. Unlike the trigger-happy liberal bourgeoisie.

Tonight, I was supposed to have been in Sunderland, where George Galloway was to have delivered a strikingly similar speech to a very working-class, and again largely young and male, audience. But the agents of the State threatened to bomb the pub, the Mountain Daisy, which we should all patronise as soon as possible.

Nothing that Hitchens said could not have been uttered by Galloway on The Mother of All Talk Shows. On Ukrainian corruption, on Ukrainian Nazism, on the root of the problem in NATO expansion, on the war in the Donbas since 2014, on the wrongness of last year's Russian invasion, on the hypocrisy of claiming any moral high ground while maintaining Britain's poisonous relationship with Saudi Arabia, on the counterproductive effect of sanctions, on the obscenity of intervening in other people's war in the midst of a cost of living crisis at home, on the need for armed neutrality, on the threat to freedom of speech, on everything. They should go on tour together.

Never more necessary, armed neutrality has never been under greater threat. Switzerland is participating in the sanctions regime against Russia, while Sweden is seeking accession to NATO. Along with the closely related rise in resistance to mass immiseration, rising public doubt about the war in Ukraine will be and is the story of Britain in 2023. Yet the hawkishness of the Official Opposition on both fronts increases by the day. It is almost funny. But it is not.

Therefore, with a General Election not due until December 2024, 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.