Friday, 28 April 2023

National Front?

Two of the five keynote speakers at next month's National Conservatism Conference are Cabinet Ministers, and one of them has been so almost continuously since 2010. At least four hold hardline neoconservative foreign policy positions, and no one has ever heard of the other one.

That is one of many reasons to wonder which, if any, specific nation this event's organisers or attendees had in mind. Wayne Madsen sets out how common that sort of concern is on the Right. Or, at any rate, how common that sort of concern ought to be about the Right.

Proven Only Too Well

Diplock courts, or whatever they are now being called, are to be kept in Northern Ireland. Every argument that is advanced for them has been supposedly the case throughout the United Kingdom for 22 years. All sorts of measures have been enacted on that purported basis.

Not only that, but the United Kingdom is going to be the worst-performing economy in the G7 this year, so a lid needs to be kept on any popular dissent. It is time, then, for a security emergency, thanks to one or both of the Loyalist paramilitaries and the dissident Republicans. If those did not exist, then our rulers would have to invent them. And at different times, those did not used to exist. Republican and Loyalist paramilitaries have always been heavily involved in traditional organised crime in general, and in drug-dealing in particular, leading to generations of professional and social interaction of the kind that also takes place routinely among, for example, rival Mafia families, as well, as of course, the sort of merciless bloodshed that goes on in that world.

There has never been any secret that the Loyalist organisations were off-the-books arms of the British State, while the old IRA was also riddled from top to bottom with Police informants, MI5 assets, and so on, as was the Real IRA, and as at least has been the much older Continuity IRA, which goes back to the split over abstentionism in 1986. The recent documentaries about David Rupert, and about "Robert" by the superlative Peter Taylor, undeniably broke ground, and were a reminder of how good the BBC could be, but they could not have surprised anyone.

And early last month, four Protestants, at least one with known Loyalist paramilitary connections, were arrested in relation to the attempted murder of Detective Chief Inspector John Caldwell, for which the New IRA had already claimed responsibility. There has always been a school of thought that the New IRA was a false flag operation. There has never been any doubt as to the true nature of the likes of the UDA, the UVF, and Ulster Resistance, which provided the then Queen's Government with confidence and supply from 2017 to 2019. Across that ostensible divide, it is all heating up over there just as it is all threatening to heat up, by our standards, over here.

Our masters have already introduced identity cards by requiring them if you wanted to vote, and they have done so specifically because, "They have them in Northern Ireland." Watch out for Diplock courts. Those are already coming to Scotland, and unlike on gender self-identification, there would be nothing that the British Government could possibly say about them even if it wanted to.

The availability of the not proven verdict was the reason why it was ever possible to be found guilty on the verdict of a mere eight people, but the former provision is to go while the latter is to remain. As in our own benighted jurisdiction, anyone who had ever made a complaint of sexual assault will now enjoy lifelong anonymity even after having been convicted of having made a false allegation. And sexual assault itself is to be tried by a salaried State employee sitting alone, under orders to meet the State's target conviction rate, which is clearly 100 per cent. As, of course, it would be, since the State brings the prosecution.

Once this were in place in Scotland, then it would be said to have worked there, and it would be introduced Kingdom-wide. A preemptive strike is urgently necessary. The Holyrood by-election at Nicola Sturgeon's seat of Glasgow Southside cannot possibly come to soon. And in a one-off vote for a Holyrood or Westminster candidate who supported Scottish independence, it needs to be won by Alex Salmond.

Potential Perceived Conflict

Until today, the Chairman of the BBC, and the President of the King's Bench Division, were twins. Twins.

The Culture Secretary who signed off on Richard Sharp was Oliver Dowden. How many Deputy Prime Ministers is it possible to lose in a fortnight? But believe in the end of Boris Johnson when you see it. Why did he need £800,000? Do not expect anyone to ask.

Any more than Keir Starmer will stand up on Wednesday and ask Rishi Sunak whether Johnson would be refused endorsement as a Conservative parliamentary candidate at the next General Election, since Jeremy Corbyn was to be refused endorsement as a Labour candidate? No one has ever, ever accused Corbyn of being a crook. No one has ever suggested that Johnson was anything else.

Sharp Practice

The Government says that it will use the existing procedure to find a new Chairman of the BBC. It is not as if Rishi Sunak needs £800,000, but there you go. Let's see if we can crowdfund it to get the gig for me. Full reimbursement in the event of failure. Who's in?

More broadly, there is no such thing as political independence in these things, nor should there be. People who bemoan its absence or decline, mean the presence or emergence of people who did not automatically agree with them about everything.

That Can Blossom In Darkest Khartoum?

Four years ago, your hardiest bloom of a blogger told you to keep an eye on Sudan. This one could be as complicated as Syria. But amid the glittering array of bad guys, you can bet your life that the British elite will not only feel the need to back one, but will then back the worst of the lot. It always does.

That is the grownup thing to do, you see. The sensible approach. The centre ground. Those of us who have been proved right about all of these things, ever, will be howled down or ignored, as we always are. "If I'm to make Baghdad by light of dawn," indeed.

More immediately, is this Government ruthless enough to say that the Sudanese doctors could come back only if the BMA stopped the strikes? I wouldn't put it past them. The doctors might have more luck if they were to try and "catch the Zanzibar train, And sleep till they're wakened by rain, And they're back in old England again once more."

It Strikes Me

Strikes are supposed to be disruptive. That is the point of them. Taking the chance to disrupt the Eurovision Song Contest and the FA Cup final is basic stuff. The Government knows what the answer is.

The ballot paper has arrived for reauthorisation of Unite's Political Fund. It strikes me (boom! boom!) that we should keep it in order to disaffiliate it from the Labour Party. But I am seeking counsel, and the ballot does not close until 22nd May. Watch this space.

In To Do?

Of course Bernie Sanders has endorsed Joe Biden. Sanders had an aberration about one war, 20 years ago. That's it.

It is startling that Marianne Williamson and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are already on nine per cent and 19 per cent, statistically one tenth and one fifth. But neither of them is enough of a threat to warrant the cancellation of debates. There is something else here.

The Representatives Challenge: Day 630

As already stated on the day after my release: "The instant that Labour lost control of Durham County Council, then I was granted an unsolicited tag for more than 10 weeks of future good behaviour. I invite each and every Member of Parliament for the area covered by Durham County Council, each and every member of Durham County Council, and each and every member of Lanchester Parish Council, to contact davidaslindsay@hotmail.com if they thought that I was factually or morally guilty of any criminal charge that had ever been brought against me. Not legally guilty; Bill Cosby is legally innocent. Factually and morally guilty. No name would be published except at the request of its bearer, but if anyone ever did get in touch, then the readers of this site would be the first to know." The current total is zero.

Furthermore, I invite each and every other candidate for the parliamentary seat containing Lanchester to contact davidaslindsay@hotmail.com if they thought that I was factually or morally guilty of any criminal charge that had ever been brought against me. Not legally guilty; Bill Cosby is legally innocent. Factually and morally guilty. In this case, names most certainly will be published, including as part of my election literature. The current total is zero. If that remained the case when the next General Election was called, then my literature would state that each and all of my opponents, by name, did not think that I was factually or morally guilty of any criminal charge that had ever been brought against me. At least in that event, then I challenge Oliver Kamm to contest this seat.

This post will appear daily until further notice.

Thursday, 27 April 2023

All Bets Are Off

Not before time, the debate is now open around the last, sainted Labour Government's Opposition-supported deregulation of gambling. We need to ban Fixed Odds Betting Terminals, to empower local authorities to limit the number of gambling venues, to insist on the use of that power, to end gambling on television, and to end the advertising of gambling other than at venues such as casinos and betting shops. That would be a start, anyway.

There cannot be a "free" market in general, but not in drugs, or prostitution, or pornography, or unrestricted alcohol, or unrestricted gambling. That is an important part of why there must not be a "free" market in general, which is a political choice, not a law of nature. Enacting and enforcing laws against drugs, prostitution and pornography, and regulating alcohol, tobacco and gambling, are clear examples of State intervention in, and regulation of, the economy.

When I tell you that there is going to be a hung Parliament, then you can take that to the bank. I spent the 2005 Parliament saying that it was psephologically impossible for the Heir to Blair's Conservative Party to win an overall majority. I predicted a hung Parliament on the day that the 2017 General Election was called, and I stuck to that, entirely alone, all the way up to the publication of the exit poll eight long weeks later. And on the day that Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister, I predicted that a General Election between him and Keir Starmer would result in 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.

The Representatives Challenge: Day 629

As already stated on the day after my release: "The instant that Labour lost control of Durham County Council, then I was granted an unsolicited tag for more than 10 weeks of future good behaviour. I invite each and every Member of Parliament for the area covered by Durham County Council, each and every member of Durham County Council, and each and every member of Lanchester Parish Council, to contact davidaslindsay@hotmail.com if they thought that I was factually or morally guilty of any criminal charge that had ever been brought against me. Not legally guilty; Bill Cosby is legally innocent. Factually and morally guilty. No name would be published except at the request of its bearer, but if anyone ever did get in touch, then the readers of this site would be the first to know." The current total is zero.

Furthermore, I invite each and every other candidate for the parliamentary seat containing Lanchester to contact davidaslindsay@hotmail.com if they thought that I was factually or morally guilty of any criminal charge that had ever been brought against me. Not legally guilty; Bill Cosby is legally innocent. Factually and morally guilty. In this case, names most certainly will be published, including as part of my election literature. The current total is zero. If that remained the case when the next General Election was called, then my literature would state that each and all of my opponents, by name, did not think that I was factually or morally guilty of any criminal charge that had ever been brought against me. At least in that event, then I challenge Oliver Kamm to contest this seat.

This post will appear daily until further notice.

Wednesday, 26 April 2023

The Heart of The Matter

There are only so many consultant cardiologists, so ask each of them whether he or she had told Andrew Bridgen that Covid-19 vaccination was, "the biggest crime since the Holocaust."

Nothing can be compared to the Holocaust except whatever a self-appointed clique of economically neoliberal, socially liberal, militarily hawkish Malthusians wanted to compare to it. Then the comparison cannot be question. Them's the rules.

Siding With The British People?

I do not know which educational institution's tie our 42-year-old Prime Minister remains so fond of wearing, but it never taught him not to call pickets "picketers". I had never even heard "picketers" until today. It may be American, but I do not know. No one expects a Conservative Prime Minister to know much about trade unionism, but he ought to know enough to avoid attracting outright ridicule. The same is true when Government Ministers, the BBC, and indeed right-wing Labour MPs, now refer to putting a pay offer to "a referendum". It is called a ballot, and no one, no one at all, ever used to make that mistake.

As for Keir Starmer, his favourable quotation of George Osborne said it all. The good abolition of non-domiciled status, the mediocre windfall tax, and the bad imposition of VAT on private school fees, are supposed to pay for everything. That proves that neither any of them, nor any of the measures that they were supposed to fund, would ever be attempted. Having said that, Rishi Sunak's vast, and largely foreign, wealth has always stood between him and the small overall majority that he would otherwise have been able to win against Starmer.

When I tell you that there is going to be a hung Parliament, then you can take that to the bank. I spent the 2005 Parliament saying that it was psephologically impossible for the Heir to Blair's Conservative Party to win an overall majority. I predicted a hung Parliament on the day that the 2017 General Election was called, and I stuck to that, entirely alone, all the way up to the publication of the exit poll eight long weeks later. And on the day that Sunak became Prime Minister, I predicted that a General Election between him and Starmer would result in 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.

The Representatives Challenge: Day 628

As already stated on the day after my release: "The instant that Labour lost control of Durham County Council, then I was granted an unsolicited tag for more than 10 weeks of future good behaviour. I invite each and every Member of Parliament for the area covered by Durham County Council, each and every member of Durham County Council, and each and every member of Lanchester Parish Council, to contact davidaslindsay@hotmail.com if they thought that I was factually or morally guilty of any criminal charge that had ever been brought against me. Not legally guilty; Bill Cosby is legally innocent. Factually and morally guilty. No name would be published except at the request of its bearer, but if anyone ever did get in touch, then the readers of this site would be the first to know." The current total is zero.

Furthermore, I invite each and every other candidate for the parliamentary seat containing Lanchester to contact davidaslindsay@hotmail.com if they thought that I was factually or morally guilty of any criminal charge that had ever been brought against me. Not legally guilty; Bill Cosby is legally innocent. Factually and morally guilty. In this case, names most certainly will be published, including as part of my election literature. The current total is zero. If that remained the case when the next General Election was called, then my literature would state that each and all of my opponents, by name, did not think that I was factually or morally guilty of any criminal charge that had ever been brought against me. At least in that event, then I challenge Oliver Kamm to contest this seat.

This post will appear daily until further notice.

Tuesday, 25 April 2023

The Bobby Problem

It is not as if Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is going to be nominated, and I am far too young to "get" the Kennedy thing, anyway. But while I appreciate that he is anti-war, that he is economically egalitarian by American standards, and that he is accordingly averse to erosions of civil liberties, he is also an anti-industrial Malthusian, an anti-vaxxer, and, well, yes, a very liberal Catholic indeed, who therefore lacks the philosophical foundation of a truly radical alternative.

There has never been the class consciousness in the United States that there has been in Europe and the Old Commonwealth, and it has declined in those places under American influence. But when the tide turns there, then it will turn everywhere. The failure of the woke movement to take economic inequality seriously, and therefore to include vast numbers of its victims, may well be the turning point. This, though, does not look like that point just yet.

Identity Politics

The photographs for the voter ID are not free, so that is a lie, for a start. But you do not need any form of it for a postal vote, which really is free. Far from favouring Labour, and the communities cited would not vote for Keir Starmer to save their lives, postal voting kept the Conservatives as the largest party in 2017. Had that seemingly interminable General Election campaign lasted yet another week, then it could not even have done that, but enough people had voted early by post for the Theresa May campaign that we all then had the pleasure of watching collapse.

Electoral fraud in Britain is in single figures even in General Election years, and it is almost always perpetrated by candidates, although never such as to affect an outcome. A Government that won an overall majority of 80 under the present arrangements sounds very odd when it claims that those are riddled with fraud and somehow rigged towards the other side. But that is not what this is really about.

This is about identity cards, which have been the Home Office's solution in search of a problem for as long as I can remember. And identity cards, which are once again Labour Party policy as well, obtained from whom? The Passport Office and the DVLA, documentation from one or other of which is now required in order to exercise the franchise, are about to be privatised. Who is going to buy them? Infosys? The foreign states that have bought the utilities and the rail companies? Who, exactly? Meanwhile, we are now going to have American-style denial of the result at every election for evermore, or at least while this madness lasted.

But when I tell you that there is going to be a hung Parliament, then you can take that to the bank. I spent the 2005 Parliament saying that it was psephologically impossible for the Heir to Blair's Conservative Party to win an overall majority. I predicted a hung Parliament on the day that the 2017 General Election was called, and I stuck to that, entirely alone, all the way up to the publication of the exit poll eight long weeks later. And on the day that Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister, I predicted that a General Election between him and Starmer would result in 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.

The Representatives Challenge: Day 627

As already stated on the day after my release: "The instant that Labour lost control of Durham County Council, then I was granted an unsolicited tag for more than 10 weeks of future good behaviour. I invite each and every Member of Parliament for the area covered by Durham County Council, each and every member of Durham County Council, and each and every member of Lanchester Parish Council, to contact davidaslindsay@hotmail.com if they thought that I was factually or morally guilty of any criminal charge that had ever been brought against me. Not legally guilty; Bill Cosby is legally innocent. Factually and morally guilty. No name would be published except at the request of its bearer, but if anyone ever did get in touch, then the readers of this site would be the first to know." The current total is zero.

Furthermore, I invite each and every other candidate for the parliamentary seat containing Lanchester to contact davidaslindsay@hotmail.com if they thought that I was factually or morally guilty of any criminal charge that had ever been brought against me. Not legally guilty; Bill Cosby is legally innocent. Factually and morally guilty. In this case, names most certainly will be published, including as part of my election literature. The current total is zero. If that remained the case when the next General Election was called, then my literature would state that each and all of my opponents, by name, did not think that I was factually or morally guilty of any criminal charge that had ever been brought against me. At least in that event, then I challenge Oliver Kamm to contest this seat.

This post will appear daily until further notice.

Monday, 24 April 2023

Apology Excepted?

Diane Abbott has apologised, which has been considered enough when right-wing Labour MPs have been racist if that has even been treated as a problem, but it is not enough when she does it. That is the hierarchy of racism, right there.

Travellers were the oppressed group that Abbott wronged, yet the views of the anti-Traveller fanatic John Mann are sought, aired, and acted upon. That is the hierarchy of racism, right there. Along with the views of Margaret Hodge, who called for an all-white housing policy in the Barking and Dagenham Borough that contained her constituency. That is the hierarchy of racism, right there. And along with the views of Jake Wallis Simons, who simply made up a Palestinian Muslim threat to bomb a church near Bethlehem; it is in fact the people running Israel who attack churches, not that you will have heard. That is the hierarchy of racism, right there.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission is still taken seriously, yet it sacked its black and disabled staff first, it flatly refused to investigate discrimination and worse against Muslims in the Conservative Party, and it managed to find nothing wrong in the Government's conduct of the Windrush scandal. That is the hierarchy of racism, right there.

Unlike Abbott, no one on the Labour front bench was among the mere six Labour MPs who voted against the 2014 Immigration Act that caused the Windrush scandal. That is the hierarchy of racism, right there. No action has been taken against anyone named in the Forde Report, including those who racially abused Abbott. That is the hierarchy of racism, right there.

And then there is David Baddiel, an unfunny comedian from the olden days when he tagged along with Rob Newman and Frank Skinner, yet who has managed to appoint himself as this country's preeminent public intellectual, always interviewed either on his own or alongside people who were in awe of him, never questioned on his assertion that anti-Semitism was like cancer while all other forms of racism were no more than shingles, and with his abuse of Jason Lee and of the Irish forgotten along with his abuse of the disabled. That is the hierarchy of racism, right there.

Hierarchies of racism are not peculiar to Britain. At least half of Jews in Israel are of Middle Eastern or North African origin. They look like Arabs, they spoke Arabic at home until very recently, some of them still do, and their great texts were written in Arabic but using Hebrew script. In general, Israeli public life does not reflect this.

But then, the Israeli elite knows why it has the support that it does in the West. Israel's whiteness is seen as its attraction. Its flag has been prominent at Far Right rallies for at least 20 years. It attracts everyone from Neil Masterson to those Afrikaner nationalists who have converted to Judaism and moved to the West Bank. The problem is that at least half of Jews in Israel are brown and not remotely culturally European. So the brown has to be kept down.

That said, and on the assumption that they will know their place, Israel takes everyone from East Africans who have invented a religion based on the Old Testament brought by Christian missionaries, to Peruvian Indians converted to Judaism and put on the plane as a single act. Even the Pashtun are now classified as a Lost Tribe with a view to airlifting them to Israel in future, since at least they are not Arabs, and Arabs are the majority in half of the land area within the 1948 borders.

As for white Jews in Israel, they now include Russians who refuse to eat kosher food and who insist on taking their Israeli Defence Force oaths on the New Testament alone, which latter is a very long way from an Orthodox Christianity that is anything but Marcionite. They now include Russian Nazis.

Yes, Nazis, such as display the Israeli flag wherever they congregate. The ones in Ukraine are genuinely affronted that Israel has stopped arming them, which it did used to do. Israel has commendably refused to sanction itself by sanctioning Russia, either. Some Western outpost. And so much for Volodymyr Zelensky's Jewishness. Theodor Herzl held that once the Jewish State had been created, then no one who chose to remain in the Diaspora would still be entitled to call themselves Jewish. Think on.

Although if they move to Israel, then while brown Jews have it a lot harder there than brown people tend to do in Britain, black Jews have it so bad that they may as well be black here. The Ethiopian Jews, almost all of whom now live in Israel, run the standard North Atlantic anti-black gamut, perhaps attributable to the American backgrounds of many white Israelis. Discrimination in education, discrimination in housing, sterilisation, Police brutality, all the greatest hits of the capitalist system founded on the transatlantic slave trade.

In Britain, black women are four times likelier to die in childbirth, black men are seven times likelier to be stopped and searched, black people are seven times likelier to die in Police custody, black people are far less likely to be homeowners, only six black men have ever been Labour MPs, there are only three at the moment, only two black men currently sit as Labour Peers, there are fewer than 100 black men as Labour Councillors, no black man this century has sat either as a Labour Member of the London Assembly or as a member of the party's National Executive Committee, and Abbott receives an average of 51 out of every 100 abusive tweets sent to MPs on any given day. This time last year, we had a First Lord of the Treasury who did not know how percentages or probabilities worked, and whose alcoholism and cocaine use were legendary, yet Abbott is mocked incessantly for once having been caught on the spot and for once having had a mojito on the Tube. The capitalist system founded on the transatlantic slave trade.

Until the early 1960s, 20 years after the Holocaust, anti-Semitism was the principal form of racism in Britain rather than in the Empire, and it was very, very prevalent. But Jews in Britain today do not face any form of structural racism. If they do, then what is it? Are they more likely to be poor, or unemployed, or poorly housed, or undereducated, or ill, or incarcerated, or to die early, or to be excluded from political participation, or what?

That is black people, and Muslims, and, yes, the Gypsy, Roma and Traveller people to whom Abbott did indeed owe the apology that she has extended. Yet no one is even talking about, much less from or for, the GRT communities. All the attention is to the largely self-appointed voices of those who have a very peculiar definition of not counting. That is the hierarchy of racism, right there.

Collated

This is your weekly reminder that there has been a liberal coup in the Diocese of Hexham and Newcastle. See also this, this, this, this, this, thisthisthis, thisthis and this. At least in the public sphere, I alone have fought back. I have done so to the cusp of victory. In the words of whoever wrote this:

"The Catholic Safeguarding Standards Agency (CSSA) has confirmed it is in the process of drafting a report which will be published in due course. Similarly, after a robust and thorough process, the final interviews in the investigation for the Dicastery for Bishops took place in the last few days of March, with further submissions being received within the last week. Carol Lawrence has collated all of the information and is currently drafting a report for Archbishop McMahon. As we continue to celebrate the Easter season, we ask you to remember in your prayers those currently preparing the reports. We pray for their work and for renewal in the Diocese of Hexham & Newcastle as we move forward, learning from their findings and recommendations."

That report will either be a total vindication of orthodoxy in the persons of Bishop Robert Byrne CO and the late Canon McCoy, or it will just be what some 1970s feminist axe-grinder had been bound to write, and had in fact been composed before the sham process had even begun. We win either way, because of course we do. We are doing the Lord's Work, and the God of Battles is the God of Victories.

Since no charge or even arrest has followed the alleged allegation against Bishop Byrne, then it is fair to assume that there has never been a Police investigation into His Lordship. He should now sue every media outlet that had suggested that there was one. An Oratorian does not take a vow of poverty, and the English Oratories have friends who could afford any lawyer in London. I alone have publicly defended Bishop Byrne. I have done so from the very start.

The Representatives Challenge: Day 626

As already stated on the day after my release: "The instant that Labour lost control of Durham County Council, then I was granted an unsolicited tag for more than 10 weeks of future good behaviour. I invite each and every Member of Parliament for the area covered by Durham County Council, each and every member of Durham County Council, and each and every member of Lanchester Parish Council, to contact davidaslindsay@hotmail.com if they thought that I was factually or morally guilty of any criminal charge that had ever been brought against me. Not legally guilty; Bill Cosby is legally innocent. Factually and morally guilty. No name would be published except at the request of its bearer, but if anyone ever did get in touch, then the readers of this site would be the first to know." The current total is zero.

Furthermore, I invite each and every other candidate for the parliamentary seat containing Lanchester to contact davidaslindsay@hotmail.com if they thought that I was factually or morally guilty of any criminal charge that had ever been brought against me. Not legally guilty; Bill Cosby is legally innocent. Factually and morally guilty. In this case, names most certainly will be published, including as part of my election literature. The current total is zero. If that remained the case when the next General Election was called, then my literature would state that each and all of my opponents, by name, did not think that I was factually or morally guilty of any criminal charge that had ever been brought against me. At least in that event, then I challenge Oliver Kamm to contest this seat.

This post will appear daily until further notice.

Sunday, 23 April 2023

Travellers' Checks?

Diane Abbott has apologised, but blaming the staff is never a good look, and references to Civil Rights and apartheid speak of her own generation, to which it is doubtful that anyone in her office belongs. The absence of any mention of George Floyd or of Black Lives Matter does not suggest the work of a twentysomething.

Yet notice that no one called her out over Travellers. How could they have done? Charlotte Nichols, and people who started out on the Left are always the worst, distributed an anti-Traveller leaflet that had to be destroyed. Christian Wakeford is now a Labour Whip having voted to criminalise Travellers, pretty much as such, under one of the numerous horrific terms of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, which is now an Act. Only the murder of Sarah Everard moved Keir Starmer to oppose that Bill, and he has no plan to repeal that Act.

The third episode of The Labour Files is The Hierarchy, about the hierarchy of racism in the Labour Party. It is no wonder that that has won the Gold Award for documentaries at the New York Festivals TV and Film Awards. Those awards, those festivals and that city may be many things, but it is fair to say that they are not anti-Semitic.

Do the very visibly Jewish Haredim in Hackney think that Abbott is anti-Semitic? Her central point was well made, that you can sometimes hide being Jewish, or Irish, or a Traveller, but you can never hide being black or brown. Starmer already knew that, since a recent Labour campaign ad, suggesting that Rishi Sunak was a paedophile because he was brown, used a trick of the light to darken his skin.

But when I tell you that there is going to be a hung Parliament, then you can take that to the bank. I spent the 2005 Parliament saying that it was psephologically impossible for the Heir to Blair's Conservative Party to win an overall majority. I predicted a hung Parliament on the day that the 2017 General Election was called, and I stuck to that, entirely alone, all the way up to the publication of the exit poll eight long weeks later. And on the day that Sunak became Prime Minister, I predicted that a General Election between him and Starmer would result in 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.

Pillow Talk

"Workshy" seems to be the Word of the Week among the people whose only job is the weekly production of anything between 1200 and as few as 800 words of whatever they happened to think. It is now technologically possible to do that without getting out of bed.

From their beds, they called more belated workers from home, a practice that does have its disadvantages, "workshy". And now, for its having got rid of Dominic Raab, the entire Civil Service is so described. That, and "politicised". Well, yes.

Others members of the Duvet Club are bewailing the proposed "politicisation" of the Civil Service, but if you did not already know how political that was, then you must have shared its politics. Like the BBC, say. Or the education system. Or the charities sector. Or the Police. When people complain about the politicisation of those, then they are complaining about a change from their own politics to someone else's.

Points of Difference

Well, that's black London gone. The staff of The Guardian will vote Labour next year. No one else will. It cannot be said too many times that Jews were specifically classified as white both under the Jim Crow laws and under apartheid, and it is by definition impossible to be whiter than that. Indeed, some Afrikaner nationalists have converted to Judaism and moved to the West Bank. Anyone may convert to Judaism, thereby acquiring the Right of "Return". Let that sink in.

Here we are. The whole of history is the Second World War, the whole of that was the Holocaust, the only victims of the Holocaust were the Jews, and that places beyond criticism every action of the Israeli Far Right. Diane Abbott should not have said what she did about Travellers, but if you want to see the hierarchy of racism in action, then look at the fact that no one is having a go at her for that, just as no one in the Labour Party has ever been punished for racial abuse of her, or indeed for anything else in the Forde Report.

That Report is ignored by the white British media, which pretend never to have heard of The Labour Files even as that series is garlanded with honours by the wider world, including the New York Festivals TV and Film Awards, which I would be prepared to bet were more than a little bit Jewish. So white voters are not going to be shocked out of voting Labour by their findings, although they are less and less likely to do so for other, equally valid reasons. But Britain's Muslim and politically black communities already knew. And now, this.

When I tell you that there is going to be a hung Parliament, then you can take that to the bank. I spent the 2005 Parliament saying that it was psephologically impossible for the Heir to Blair's Conservative Party to win an overall majority. I predicted a hung Parliament on the day that the 2017 General Election was called, and I stuck to that, entirely alone, all the way up to the publication of the exit poll eight long weeks later. And on the day that Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister, I predicted that a General Election between him and Keir Starmer would result in 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.

The People of Saint George

There is a legend about Saint George, but he himself is not a purely legendary figure. His tomb at his birthplace, which is now known as Lod, was once a major focus of unity between Christians and Muslims in devotion to the Patron Saint of Palestine, Lebanon and Egypt before, and as much as, the Patron Saint of England. But three quarters of those who practised that devotion were violently expelled at the foundation of the State of Israel in 1948.

In similar vein, it is proposed to expand Jerusalem Walls National Park to include the Mount of Olives, under the control of Elad, a militant Israeli settler organisation. Benjamin Netanyahu depends for his parliamentary majority on people who actively believe that there is a religious obligation to burn down churches, since they hold the Divinity of Christ to be an idolatrous assertion. They recently desecrated the Protestant cemetery on Mount Zion, where it is maintained by the local Anglican diocese on behalf of a British owner.

While fourth generation Israelis could not possibly be told to “go home”, the State of Israel’s having been founded in the same year that the Empire Windrush docked at Tilbury, it is clear from the Bible that the pre-Israelite population, the founders of Jerusalem, never went away. They never have. They became Christian when or before the Roman Empire did, and they adopted the use of Arabic at the time of a Muslim Conquest contemporaneous with the Saxon Conquest of what is now England. Those ancient indigenous Christians are still there. The founders of modern Palestinian identity, they are the people of Shireen Abu Akleh, the people of Saint George. Parties that burn down their churches are now in government in Israel, and are about to take control of the Mount of Olives.

The Representatives Challenge: Day 625

As already stated on the day after my release: "The instant that Labour lost control of Durham County Council, then I was granted an unsolicited tag for more than 10 weeks of future good behaviour. I invite each and every Member of Parliament for the area covered by Durham County Council, each and every member of Durham County Council, and each and every member of Lanchester Parish Council, to contact davidaslindsay@hotmail.com if they thought that I was factually or morally guilty of any criminal charge that had ever been brought against me. Not legally guilty; Bill Cosby is legally innocent. Factually and morally guilty. No name would be published except at the request of its bearer, but if anyone ever did get in touch, then the readers of this site would be the first to know." The current total is zero.

Furthermore, I invite each and every other candidate for the parliamentary seat containing Lanchester to contact davidaslindsay@hotmail.com if they thought that I was factually or morally guilty of any criminal charge that had ever been brought against me. Not legally guilty; Bill Cosby is legally innocent. Factually and morally guilty. In this case, names most certainly will be published, including as part of my election literature. The current total is zero. If that remained the case when the next General Election was called, then my literature would state that each and all of my opponents, by name, did not think that I was factually or morally guilty of any criminal charge that had ever been brought against me. At least in that event, then I challenge Oliver Kamm to contest this seat.

This post will appear daily until further notice.

Saturday, 22 April 2023

We All Have Our Crosses To Bear

A post has disappeared. I do not now which one it is, but the number is down one from an hour ago. Oliver Kamm does this from time to time, he goes whining to Google to have my posts taken down. It keeps him off Wikipedia, I suppose. What a full and active life he leads. I am pleased to see that he is enjoying his Saturday night.

30 Years On

Stephen Lawrence was murdered 30 years ago today. The only abiding legacy of his case has been the abolition of the immemorial protection against double jeopardy, without which there is no presumption of innocence. That ought now to be restored at least for offences that were alleged to have been committed after the coming into effect of the Criminal Justice Act 2003.

Not that the Conservatives defended that ancient liberty at the time. In 13 years, there has never been the slightest suggestion of its restoration. The Opposition did not oppose the Blair Government's very extensive assault on civil liberties, and in office has not repealed any of it. Quite the reverse, in fact. In this one instance, Stephen Lawrence was a convenient excuse. Tony Blair and his succession of nightmare Home Secretaries would have done this, anyway.

Cheered on, as ever, by the other side, since they had taken over where Michael Howard had left off, having criticised him only for not going far enough, the compliment that was then returned. It was Jeremy Corbyn who wanted his parliamentary comrade in the defence of liberty, Diane Abbott, to be Home Secretary, and their supporter, Shami Chakrabarti, to be Attorney General.

Other than double jeopardy, what is there to show for this most celebrated of causes célèbres? Go round Eltham now and and tell the black boys who could have been Lawrence's sons, and who may be his nephews or his cousins, about how his case had "stopped the Met from being racist". Go on. I dare you. And go over the people who had been convicted of offences of which they had previously been acquitted. I would bet you anything you liked that they were disproportionately of a duskier hue. As well as being almost invariably working-class.

Regular readers may be wondering how I am going to work Keir Starmer into this one. But I do not need to. He does it for me. He insinuates himself into this case, despite, well, again, ask the black boys on the streets about him. Thankfully, his party's poll lead remains in free fall while his personal rating remains negative.

When I tell you that there is going to be a hung Parliament, then you can take that to the bank. I spent the 2005 Parliament saying that it was psephologically impossible for the Heir to Blair's Conservative Party to win an overall majority. I predicted a hung Parliament on the day that the 2017 General Election was called, and I stuck to that, entirely alone, all the way up to the publication of the exit poll eight long weeks later. And on the day that Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister, I predicted that a General Election between him and Starmer would result in 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.

The Chain Gang No More

And so Dominic Raab joins the fringe backbench ranks of Kwasi Kwarteng, Priti Patel, Liz Truss, and someone called Chris Skidmore, who at 41 has already announced his retirement at the next General Election. So much for Britannia Unchained. "An inevitable slide into mediocrity," indeed. None of them will ever again be a Minister.

There is an unanswerable case for refusing to endorse Raab, Kwarteng and Truss, at least, as Conservative parliamentary candidates next year. Kwarteng and Truss crashed the economy such as will not be fully corrected in any of our lifetimes. And if Raab is morally unfit to be Deputy Prime Minister, then how can he be morally fit to be an MP?

Only the Raab one would happen, though, if any of them did. Such a pity, as it would have been great fun to have seen Truss tour South West Norfolk and explain why she agreed with Professor Patrick Minford that Britain should have no agriculture. That ought still to happen, but alas, it will not. As for Raab, his majority of 23,298 in 2017 fell to 2,743 last time, at what was overall a hugely successful General Election for his party. Word gets around, and very nearly enough of his constituents had already heard what he was like. They all have now.

Candidates who stand against the Conservative Party overtly from its right have a hopeless record. Douglas Carswell and Mark Reckless held their own seats for UKIP at by-election but lost them back to the Conservatives at the subsequent General Election, and that's it. Diane Abbott's majority at Hackney North and Stoke Newington is more than the total number of votes that Nigel Farage has won across the seven parliamentary elections that he has contested. By contrast, George Galloway's victory at Bradford West, publicly predicted only by me, remains the stuff of legend, while no one doubts for a second that Jeremy Corbyn would take 20,000 votes and be the First Past the Post at Islington North.

And when I tell you that there is going to be a hung Parliament, then you can take that to the bank. I spent the 2005 Parliament saying that it was psephologically impossible for the Heir to Blair's Conservative Party to win an overall majority. I predicted a hung Parliament on the day that the 2017 General Election was called, and I stuck to that, entirely alone, all the way up to the publication of the exit poll eight long weeks later. And on the day that Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister, I predicted that a General Election between him and Keir Starmer would result in 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.

The Representatives Challenge: Day 624

As already stated on the day after my release: "The instant that Labour lost control of Durham County Council, then I was granted an unsolicited tag for more than 10 weeks of future good behaviour. I invite each and every Member of Parliament for the area covered by Durham County Council, each and every member of Durham County Council, and each and every member of Lanchester Parish Council, to contact davidaslindsay@hotmail.com if they thought that I was factually or morally guilty of any criminal charge that had ever been brought against me. Not legally guilty; Bill Cosby is legally innocent. Factually and morally guilty. No name would be published except at the request of its bearer, but if anyone ever did get in touch, then the readers of this site would be the first to know." The current total is zero.

Furthermore, I invite each and every other candidate for the parliamentary seat containing Lanchester to contact davidaslindsay@hotmail.com if they thought that I was factually or morally guilty of any criminal charge that had ever been brought against me. Not legally guilty; Bill Cosby is legally innocent. Factually and morally guilty. In this case, names most certainly will be published, including as part of my election literature. The current total is zero. If that remained the case when the next General Election was called, then my literature would state that each and all of my opponents, by name, did not think that I was factually or morally guilty of any criminal charge that had ever been brought against me. At least in that event, then I challenge Oliver Kamm to contest this seat.

This post will appear daily until further notice.

Friday, 21 April 2023

Oh, Jeremy Corbyn: The Big Lie

This afternoon, I saw the wonderful Oh, Jeremy Corbyn: The Big Lie, which does not shy away from Corbyn's own failure to defend himself and his supporters, and which points out that the anti-Semitism scam was only the one that happened to stick of half a dozen smears.

It reminds us of the open threat of a military coup if Corbyn had won, and it posits the likelihood of an assassination. It argues convincingly that Keir Starmer has always been a spycop planted as a saboteur, and it sets out the fact that his unilateral change to Brexit policy deliberately caused both the 2019 General Election and its result.

And it names the original failing of the Corbyn Project, the failure to sack the Labour Party's entire staff on day one and start again from scratch. What a revolting lot those staff were. Their purported workplace was swearier than prison, and I mean that seriously, but full of people who would not have lasted 48 hours in there, likewise.

In the discussion afterwards, I explained that their racism was not news to me, since the one who had used the Angry Black Woman trope against Diane Abbott had been calling me a "Mulatto" online for 20 years, having been imposed as a council candidate over my head because his employer, Hilary Armstrong, had been, as he was, a racist. Peter Kyle is another of her former staffers, so of course he thinks that all brown men are called Muhammad. Ignore Starmer on Dominic Raab unless he expels the people named in the Forde Report.

All of this took place in the belly of the right-wing Labour beast, Stanley Civic Hall. I have no idea how they booked that venue. It was hardly as if the Labour members of Stanley Town Council did not know who they were. But Lanchester will be moving into North Durham, so I would like to thank the Labour Party members who organised this event for such a successful start to my Independent candidacy.

When I tell you that there is going to be a hung Parliament, then you can take that to the bank. I spent the 2005 Parliament saying that it was psephologically impossible for the Heir to Blair's Conservative Party to win an overall majority. I predicted a hung Parliament on the day that the 2017 General Election was called, and I stuck to that, entirely alone, all the way up to the publication of the exit poll eight long weeks later. And on the day that Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister, I predicted that a General Election between him and Starmer would result in 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.

The Representatives Challenge: Day 623

As already stated on the day after my release: "The instant that Labour lost control of Durham County Council, then I was granted an unsolicited tag for more than 10 weeks of future good behaviour. I invite each and every Member of Parliament for the area covered by Durham County Council, each and every member of Durham County Council, and each and every member of Lanchester Parish Council, to contact davidaslindsay@hotmail.com if they thought that I was factually or morally guilty of any criminal charge that had ever been brought against me. Not legally guilty; Bill Cosby is legally innocent. Factually and morally guilty. No name would be published except at the request of its bearer, but if anyone ever did get in touch, then the readers of this site would be the first to know." The current total is zero.

Furthermore, I invite each and every other candidate for the parliamentary seat containing Lanchester to contact davidaslindsay@hotmail.com if they thought that I was factually or morally guilty of any criminal charge that had ever been brought against me. Not legally guilty; Bill Cosby is legally innocent. Factually and morally guilty. In this case, names most certainly will be published, including as part of my election literature. The current total is zero. If that remained the case when the next General Election was called, then my literature would state that each and all of my opponents, by name, did not think that I was factually or morally guilty of any criminal charge that had ever been brought against me. At least in that event, then I challenge Oliver Kamm to contest this seat.

This post will appear daily until further notice.

Thursday, 20 April 2023

Feeding Time

The refusal to feed the population is how revolutions start. Inflation is either deliberately engineered, or it is a result of not understanding how the money supply works. That lack of understanding also underlies any suggestion that the present inflation has been caused by any of the measures taken during the recent pandemic; such suggestions are economically illiterate.

Of course, the State can issue itself with as much currency as it pleases, and then use its readily available fiscal and monetary means to control any inflationary effect, but there does have to be anything to buy. The current scarcity arises out of the sanctions regime, and that is the only way in which it is related to the war in Ukraine. None of this is in any way related to Brexit. Except, again, unless it has been contrived to be.

But when I tell you that there is going to be a hung Parliament, then you can take that to the bank. I spent the 2005 Parliament saying that it was psephologically impossible for the Heir to Blair’s Conservative Party to win an overall majority. I predicted a hung Parliament on the day that the 2017 General Election was called, and I stuck to that, entirely alone, all the way up to the publication of the exit poll eight long weeks later. And on the day that Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister, I predicted that a General Election between him and Keir Starmer would result in 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.

Before The Latingate?

On that business in Saint John Lateran, the people who have let you do this because you asked, would let anyone do this if they asked.

It is not because they think that you are anything special. It is just that no one else would ever ask.

The Representatives Challenge: Day 622

As already stated on the day after my release: "The instant that Labour lost control of Durham County Council, then I was granted an unsolicited tag for more than 10 weeks of future good behaviour. I invite each and every Member of Parliament for the area covered by Durham County Council, each and every member of Durham County Council, and each and every member of Lanchester Parish Council, to contact davidaslindsay@hotmail.com if they thought that I was factually or morally guilty of any criminal charge that had ever been brought against me. Not legally guilty; Bill Cosby is legally innocent. Factually and morally guilty. No name would be published except at the request of its bearer, but if anyone ever did get in touch, then the readers of this site would be the first to know." The current total is zero.

Furthermore, I invite each and every other candidate for the parliamentary seat containing Lanchester to contact davidaslindsay@hotmail.com if they thought that I was factually or morally guilty of any criminal charge that had ever been brought against me. Not legally guilty; Bill Cosby is legally innocent. Factually and morally guilty. In this case, names most certainly will be published, including as part of my election literature. The current total is zero. If that remained the case when the next General Election was called, then my literature would state that each and all of my opponents, by name, did not think that I was factually or morally guilty of any criminal charge that had ever been brought against me. At least in that event, then I challenge Oliver Kamm to contest this seat.

This post will appear daily until further notice.

Wednesday, 19 April 2023

From Unsayable To Undeniable

The third episode of The Labour Files is The Hierarchy, about the hierarchy of racism in the Labour Party. It has won the Gold Award for documentaries at the New York Festivals TV and Film Awards. Those awards, those festivals and that city must be anti-Semitic.

The struggle goes on, with Marc Wadsworth hosting this Zoom event next Tuesday for the thirtieth anniversary of the murder of Stephen Lawrence. Although he tries to insinuate a connection to the Lawrence case, the speakers at that event will not include the man of whom we now know that, Sir Keir Starmer got free football tickets from a firm that was ordered to pay out £10.8million over defective cladding in a landmark court ruling after the Grenfell Tower disaster.

And in a sign of how long ago was the contact between the CIA’s Alec Station and at least two 9/11 hijackers, which could not have been any later than a whole nine days ago, the Saudi Foreign Minister was visiting Syria just as Israel was hosting the ridiculous fantasist Reza Pahlavi, who is supported by a mostly elderly three per cent of Iranian-Americans, heavily concentrated in and around Los Angeles, and by almost no one else in the world. Yet Rabbi Leo Dee, of and from whom we may expect to hear a very great deal over the next 40 years, practically anointed Pahlavi as King of Iran and looked forward to visiting him very soon" in his Palace in Tehran. It is in fact the King of Saudi Arabia who has been invited to visit that city.

The caravan has moved on. Returning to New York, Foreign Affairs describes itself, not unfairly, as “the leading magazine for in-depth analysis and debate of foreign policy, geopolitics and international affairs”. In its latest edition, clearly unperturbed at the prospect of ineligibility for membership of the British Labour Party, Michael Barnett, Nathan Brown, Marc Lynch, and Shibley Telhami write:

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s return to power in Israel with a narrow, extreme right-wing coalition has shattered even the illusion of a two-state solution. Members of his new government have not been shy about stating their views on what Israel is and what it should be in all the territories it controls: a Greater Israel defined not just as a Jewish state but one in which the law enshrines Jewish supremacy over all Palestinians who remain there. As a result, it is no longer possible to avoid confronting a one-state reality.

Israel’s radical new government did not create this reality but rather made it impossible to deny. The temporary status of “occupation” of the Palestinian territories is now a permanent condition in which one state ruled by one group of people rules over another group of people. The promise of a two-state solution made sense as an alternative future in the years around the 1993 Oslo accords, when there were constituencies for compromise on both the Israeli and the Palestinian sides and when tangible if fleeting progress was made toward building the institutions of a hypothetical Palestinian state. But that period ended long ago. Today, it makes little sense to let fantastical visions for the future obscure deeply embedded existing arrangements.

It is past time to grapple with what a one-state reality means for policy, politics, and analysis. Palestine is not a state in waiting, and Israel is not a democratic state incidentally occupying Palestinian territory. All the territory west of the Jordan River has long constituted a single state under Israeli rule, where the land and the people are subject to radically different legal regimes, and Palestinians are permanently treated as a lower caste. Policymakers and analysts who ignore this one-state reality will be condemned to failure and irrelevance, doing little beyond providing a smokescreen for the entrenchment of the status quo. 

Some implications of this one-state reality are clear. The world will not stop caring about Palestinian rights, no matter how fervently many supporters of Israel (and Arab rulers) wish they would. Violence, dispossession, and human rights abuses have escalated over the last year, and the risk of large-scale violent confrontation grows with every day that Palestinians are locked in this ever-expanding system of legalized oppression and Israeli encroachment. But far less clear is how important actors will adjust—if they adjust at all—as the reality of a single state shifts from open secret to undeniable truth.

U.S. President Joe Biden seems fully committed to the status quo, and there is no evidence that his administration has thought about the issue or done much beyond crisis management and mouthing displeasure. A strong sense of wishful thinking permeates Washington, with many U.S. officials still trying to convince themselves that there is a chance of returning to a two-state negotiation after the aberrant Netanyahu government leaves office. But ignoring the new reality will not be an option for much longer. A storm is gathering in Israel and Palestine that demands an urgent response from the country that has most enabled the emergence of a single state upholding Jewish supremacy. If the United States wants to avoid profound instability in the Middle East and a challenge to its broader global agenda, it must cease exempting Israel from the standards and structures of the liberal international order that Washington hopes to lead.

From unsayable to undeniable

one-state arrangement is not a future possibility; it already exists, no matter what anyone thinks. Between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, one state controls the entry and exit of people and goods, oversees security, and has the capacity to impose its decisions, laws, and policies on millions of people without their consent.

A one-state reality could, in principle, be based on democratic rule and equal citizenship. But such an arrangement is not on offer at the moment. Forced to choose between Israel’s Jewish identity and liberal democracy, Israel has chosen the former. It has locked in a system of Jewish supremacy, wherein non-Jews are structurally discriminated against or excluded in a tiered scheme: some non-Jews have most of, but not all, the rights that Jews have, while most non-Jews live under severe segregation, separation, and domination.

A peace process in the closing years of the twentieth century offered the tantalizing possibility of something different. But since the 2000 Camp David summit, where U.S.-led negotiations failed to achieve a two-state agreement, the phrase “peace process” has served mostly to distract from the realities on the ground and to offer an excuse for not acknowledging them. The second Intifada, which erupted soon after the disappointment at Camp David, and Israel’s subsequent intrusions into the West Bank transformed the Palestinian Authority into little more than a security subcontractor for Israel. They also accelerated the rightward drift of Israeli politics, the population shifts brought about by Israeli citizens moving into the West Bank, and the geographical fragmentation of Palestinian society. The cumulative effect of these changes became evident during the 2021 crisis over the appropriation of Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem, which pitted not just Israeli settlers and Palestinians but also Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel against each other in a conflict that split cities and neighborhoods.

Netanyahu’s new government, composed of a coalition of right-wing religious and nationalist extremists, epitomizes these trends. Its members boast of their mission to create a new Israel in their image: less liberal, more religious, and more willing to own discrimination against non-Jews. Netanyahu has written that “Israel is not a state of all its citizens” but rather “of the Jewish people—and only it.” The man he appointed as minister of national security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, has declared that Gaza should be “ours” and that “the Palestinians can go to . . . Saudi Arabia or other places, like Iraq or Iran.” This extremist vision has long been shared by at least a minority of Israelis and has strong grounding in Zionist thought and practice. It began gaining adherents soon after Israel occupied the Palestinian territories in the 1967 war. And although it is not yet a hegemonic view, it can plausibly claim a majority of Israeli society and can no longer be termed a fringe position.

The fact of a one-state reality has long been obvious to those who live in Israel and the territories it controls and to anyone who has paid attention to the inexorable shifts on the ground. But in the past few years, something has changed. Until recently, the one-state reality was rarely acknowledged by important actors, and those who spoke the truth out loud were ignored or punished for doing so. With remarkable speed, however, the unsayable has become close to conventional wisdom.

Democracy for some 

To see the reality of a single state, many observers will need to put on new glasses. These are people who are used to seeing a distinction between the occupied territories and Israel proper—that is, the state as it existed before 1967, when Israel captured the West Bank and Gaza—and think Israel’s sovereignty is limited to the territory it controlled before 1967. But the state and sovereignty are not the same. The state is defined by what it controls, whereas sovereignty depends on other states’ recognizing the legality of that control.

These new glasses would disaggregate the concepts of state, sovereignty, nation, and citizenship, making it easier to see a one-state reality that is ineluctably based on relations of superiority and inferiority between Jews and non-Jews across all the territories under Israel’s differentiated but unchallenged control. Consider Israel through the lens of a state. It has control over a territory that stretches from the river to the sea, has a near monopoly on the use of force, and uses this power to sustain a draconian blockade of Gaza and control the West Bank with a system of checkpoints, policing, and relentlessly expanding settlements. Even after it withdrew forces from Gaza in 2005, the Israeli government retained control over the territory’s entry and exit points. Like parts of the West Bank, Gaza enjoys a degree of autonomy, and since the brief Palestinian civil war of 2007, the territory has been administered internally by the Islamist organization Hamas, which brooks little dissent. But Hamas does not control the territory’s coastline, airspace, or boundaries. In other words, by any reasonable definition, the Israeli state encompasses all lands from its border with Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea. 

It has been possible to overlook that reality because Israel has not made formal claims of sovereignty over all these areas. It has annexed some of the occupied territories, including East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. But it has not yet declared sovereignty over the rest of the land that it controls, and only a handful of states would be likely to recognize such claims if Israel were to make them.

Controlling territory and consolidating institutional domination without formalizing sovereignty enables Israel to maintain a one-state reality on its terms. It can deny responsibility for (and rights to) most Palestinians because they are residents of its territory but not citizens of the state, cynically justifying this discrimination on the grounds that it keeps alive the possibility of a two-state solution. By not formalizing sovereignty, Israel can be democratic for its citizens but unaccountable to millions of its residents. This arrangement has allowed many of Israel’s supporters abroad to continue to pretend that all this is temporary—that Israel remains a liberal democracy and that, someday, Palestinians will exercise their right to self-determination.

But even within its pre-1967 borders, Israel’s democracy has limits, which become apparent when viewed through the lens of citizenship. Israel’s Jewish identity and its one-state reality have produced an intricate series of legal categories that distribute differentiated rights, responsibilities, and protections. Its 2018 “nation-state” law defines Israel as “the nation-state of the Jewish People” and holds that “the exercise of the right to national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish People”; it makes no mention of democracy or equality for non-Jewish citizens.

According to this hierarchy of membership, the fullest class of citizenship is reserved for Israeli Jews (at least those whose Jewishness meets rabbinical standards); they are citizens without conditions. Palestinians who have Israeli citizenship and reside in pre-1967 Israel have political and civil rights but confront other limits—both legal and extrajudicial—on their rights, responsibilities, and protections. Palestinian residents of Jerusalem theoretically have the option of becoming Israeli citizens, but most reject it because doing so would be an act of disloyalty. Palestinians who reside in the territories are the lowest class of all. Their rights and responsibilities depend on where they live, with those in Gaza at the bottom of the hierarchy—a position that has only deteriorated since Hamas took control. Asking a Palestinian to describe his or her legal status can elicit an answer that lasts for several minutes—and is still full of ambiguities.

As long as hope existed for a two-state solution that would see Palestinians’ rights recognized, it was possible to view the situation within Israel’s 1967 boundaries as one of de jure equality combined with de facto discrimination against some citizens—an unfortunate but common reality in much of the world. But when one acknowledges the one-state reality, something more pernicious is revealed. In that one state, there are some whose movement, travel, civil status, economic activities, property rights, and access to public services are severely restricted. A substantial share of lifelong residents with deep and continuous roots in the territory of that state are rendered stateless. And all these categories and gradations of marginalization are enforced by legal, political, and security measures imposed by state actors who are accountable to only a portion of the population.

Naming this reality is politically contentious, even as a consensus has formed about the abiding and severe inequalities that define it. A flurry of reports by Israeli and international nongovernmental organizations documenting these inequalities have driven the term “apartheid” from the margins of the Israeli-Palestinian debate to its center. Apartheid refers to the system of racial segregation that South Africa’s white minority government used to enshrine white supremacy from 1948 to the early 1990s. It has since been defined under international law and by the International Criminal Court as a legalized scheme of racial segregation and discrimination and deemed a crime against humanity. Major human rights organizations, including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, have applied the term to Israel. So have many academics: according to a March 2022 poll of Middle East–focused scholars who are members of three large academic associations, 60 percent of respondents described the situation in Israel and the Palestinian territories as a “one-state reality with inequality akin to apartheid.” 

The term may not be a perfect fit. Israel’s system of structural discrimination is more severe than those of even the most illiberal states. But it is based not on race, as apartheid was defined in South Africa and is defined under international law, but on ethnicity, nationality, and religion. Perhaps this distinction matters to those who wish to take legal action against Israel. It is less important politically, however, and is virtually meaningless when it comes to analysis. What matters politically is that a once taboo term has increasingly become a mainstream, common-sense understanding of reality. Analytically, what matters is that the apartheid label accurately describes the facts on the ground and offers the beginnings of a road map to change them. Apartheid is not a magic word that alters reality when invoked. But its entry into the political mainstream reveals a broad recognition that Israeli rule is designed to maintain Jewish supremacy throughout all the territory the state controls. Israel’s system may not technically be apartheid, but it rhymes.

Rude awakening

It is primarily Israelis and Palestinians who must grapple with the one-state reality. But that reality will also complicate Israel’s relationship with the rest of the world. For half a century, the peace process allowed Western democracies to overlook Israel’s occupation in favor of an aspirational future in which the occupation would come to a mutually negotiated end. Israeli democracy (however flawed) and the nominal distinction between Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories also helped outsiders avert their gaze. All these diversions are gone. The one-state reality has long been embedded in Israeli law, politics, and society, even if it is only now being broadly acknowledged. No ready alternatives exist, and it has been decades since there was any meaningful political process to create one.

Perhaps the recognition of these facts will not change much. Many enduring global problems are never resolved. We live in a populist world, where democracy and human rights are under threat. Israeli leaders point to the Abraham Accords, which established Israel’s relations with Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), to argue that normalization with Arab states never required resolving the Palestinian issue. For their part, Western leaders may simply continue to pretend that Israel shares their liberal democratic values while many pro-Israel groups in the United States double down on their support. Liberal Jewish Americans may struggle to defend an Israel that has many characteristics of apartheid, but their protests will have little practical effect.

Yet there are reasons to believe that the transition from an aspirational two-state world to a real one-state world could be rocky. The mainstreaming of the apartheid analogy and the rise of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement—and the intense backlash against both—suggest that the political terrain has shifted. Israel may enjoy more physical security and regional diplomatic recognition than ever before, with few international or local constraints on its activities in the West Bank. But control requires more than brute strength. It also requires some semblance of legitimacy, with the status quo sustained by its taken-for-granted nature, its naturalization as common sense, and the impossibility of even contemplating justifiable resistance. Israel still has the material power to win the battles it picks. But as those battles proliferate, each victory further erodes its fighting position. Those wanting to defend the one-state reality are defending colonialist principles in a postcolonial world.

The struggle to define and shape the terms of this one-state reality may take new forms. In the past, dramatic interstate wars created openings for negotiations and high-stakes diplomacy. But in the future, U.S. policymakers are not likely to confront conventional conflicts such as those that broke out between Israel and Arab states in 1967 and 1973. Instead, they will face something closer to the first and second Intifada—sudden outbursts of violence and mass popular contestation such as those that occurred in May 2021. At that time, clashes in Jerusalem sparked a wider conflagration involving rocket fire between Israel and Hamas, demonstrations and violence in the West Bank, and ugly incidents where Israelis of Jewish and Palestinian ancestry (and the Israeli police) behaved as if ethnicity trumped citizenship. Daily acts of violence and sporadic bouts of popular upheaval—perhaps even a full third Intifada—seem inevitable.

Policymakers in the United States and elsewhere who have long talked about the need to preserve a two-state solution are increasingly being forced to react to crises for which they are unprepared. The problems engendered by the one-state reality have already sparked new solidarity movements, boycotts, and societal conflicts. Nongovernmental organizations, political movements supporting various Israeli and Palestinian causes, and transnational advocacy groups are seeking to alter global norms and sway individuals, societies, and governments with new and old media campaigns. Increasingly, they aim to label or boycott goods produced in places controlled by the Israeli government (or outlaw such boycotts) and invoke civil rights laws to mobilize their supporters and find alternatives to the feckless diplomatic efforts of government leaders.

But all these movements and campaigns seek to mobilize constituencies that are deeply divided. The Palestinians are divided between those who bear Israeli citizenship and those who have other forms of residency, as well as among those who live in East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza. They are divided between those living in the one-state reality and those living in the diaspora. They are divided between the Fatah political faction that holds sway in the West Bank and the Hamas organization that controls Gaza. They are also increasingly split along generational lines. Younger Palestinians feel less attached to the movements that channeled the political commitments and energies of their parents and grandparents and are more likely to gravitate to new groups and adopt new tactics of resistance.

Israeli Jews are similarly divided about the nature of the state, the role of religion in politics, and a host of other matters, including the rights of gays, lesbians, and other sexual minorities. Liberal Israeli Jews have organized massive protests against the Netanyahu government’s assault on democracy and the judiciary, but they have mobilized around the Palestinian issue far less, showing how internal disagreements have edged aside questions about a peace process that no longer exists.

The result is that leaders on both sides do not lead. There are politicians in all camps who want to keep a lid on the conflict, generally not in service of any strategy for resolution but out of a sense of inefficacy and inertia. Other politicians want the opposite: to shake things up and move in a sharply different direction, as U.S. President Donald Trump did with his “deal of the century,” promising an end to the conflict in a matter that virtually erased Palestinian rights and national aspirations. Jews pushing formal annexation of the occupied territories and Palestinians advocating for new modes of resistance to Israeli rule also hope to upend the status quo. But all such efforts founder on the firmly established structures of power and interests.

Under these conditions, any diplomacy undertaken in the name of resolving the conflict in a just manner will likely fail because it misreads both the possible alternatives to the current impasse and the will among all parties to achieve them. Policymakers wishing to construct better choices will have to pay attention to the ways in which the one-state system operates and evolves. They will need to understand how its various inhabitants imagine their homeland, how rights are enforced or violated, and how demographics are slowly but portentously changing.

Ghosts of the Arab Spring

Acknowledgment of the one-state reality has important—and contradictory—implications for the Arab world. The argument for the two-state solution has long assumed the importance of the Palestinian cause to Arab publics, if not to their governments. The 2002 Saudi peace initiative, which offered normalization of relations between Israel and all Arab states in exchange for complete Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories, established a baseline: peace with the Arab world would require a resolution of the Palestinian issue.

The Abraham Accords, brokered by the Trump administration and enthusiastically sustained by the Biden administration, explicitly targeted that assumption by accelerating political normalization and security cooperation between Israel and several Arab states without requiring progress on the Palestinian issue. This decoupling of Arab normalization from the Palestinian issue went a long way toward entrenching the one-state reality.

Thus far, the Abraham Accords have proved durable, surviving the formation of Netanyahu’s government with its extremist ministers. The normalization of relations between Israel and the UAE, at least, will likely outlast the next round of Israeli-Palestinian violence and even overt Israeli moves toward annexation. But since the accords were signed, no additional Arab countries have sought to normalize relations with Israel, and Saudi Arabia has continued to hedge its bets by holding off on establishing formal ties with Israel.

Arab normalization is likely to remain tethered to the Palestinian issue indefinitely outside of the Gulf countries. It is all too easy to imagine a scenario in which Israel moves to confiscate more property in Jerusalem, provokes widespread Palestinian protests, and then responds to this unrest with even greater violence and faster dispossession—eventually triggering the final collapse of the Palestinian Authority. Such an escalation could easily spark large-scale protests across the Arab world, where long-simmering economic hardship and political repression have created a tinderbox. There is also the even graver threat that Israel will expel Palestinians from the West Bank or even Jerusalem—a possibility, sometimes euphemistically called a “transfer,” that polls suggest many Israeli Jews would support. And that is to say nothing of how Hamas or Iran might exploit such conditions.

Arab rulers might not care about the Palestinians, but their people do—and those rulers care about nothing more than keeping their thrones. Fully abandoning the Palestinians after more than half a century of at least rhetorical support would be risky. Arab leaders do not fear losing elections, but they remember the Arab uprisings of 2011 all too well, and they worry about anything that invites mass popular mobilizations that could rapidly mutate into protests against their regimes.

Exit, voice or loyalty?

Acknowledging the one-state reality could also polarize the American conversation about Israel and the Palestinians. Evangelicals and many others on the political right might embrace this reality as the realization of what they consider legitimate Israeli aspirations. Many Americans who are left of center may finally recognize that Israel has fallen from the ranks of liberal democracies and may abandon the fanciful promise of two states for the goal of a single state that grants equal rights to all its residents. 

The United States bears considerable responsibility for entrenching the one-state reality, and it continues to play a powerful role in framing and shaping the Israeli-Palestinian issue. Israeli settlement construction in the West Bank would not have survived and accelerated, and occupation would not have endured, without U.S. efforts to shield Israel from repercussions at the United Nations and other international organizations. Without American technology and arms, Israel would probably not have been able to sustain its military edge in the region, which also enabled it to solidify its position in the occupied territories. And without major U.S. diplomatic efforts and resources, Israel could not have concluded peace agreements with Arab states, from Camp David to the Abraham Accords.

Yet the American conversation about Israel and the Palestinians has willfully neglected the ways in which Washington has abetted the occupation. U.S. support for the peace process has been couched both in terms of Israel’s security and in terms of the idea that only a two-state solution could preserve Israel as both Jewish and democratic. These two goals have always been in tension, but a one-state reality makes them irreconcilable.

Although the Israeli-Palestinian issue has never been high on the American public’s list of priorities, U.S. attitudes have shifted notably: support for a two-state solution has declined, and support for a single state that ensures equal citizenship has risen over the past few years. Polls show that most American voters would support a democratic Israel over a Jewish one, if forced to choose. Views on Israel have also become far more partisan, with Republicans, especially evangelicals, growing more supportive of Israeli policies and the overwhelming majority of Democrats preferring an evenhanded U.S. policy. Young Democrats now express more support for the Palestinians than for Israel. One reason for this shift, especially among young Democrats, is that the Israeli-Palestinian issue is increasingly viewed as an issue of social justice rather than strategic interest or biblical prophecy. This has been particularly true in the era of Black Lives Matter.

The one-state reality has especially roiled the politics of Jewish Americans. From the earliest years of Zionism, most Jewish American supporters of Israel held as sacrosanct the aspiration for Israel to be simultaneously Jewish and liberal. Netanyahu’s latest government might be the breaking point for this group. It is difficult to square a commitment to liberalism with support for a single state that offers the benefits of democracy to Jews (and now seems to tread on some of those) but explicitly withholds them from the majority of its non-Jewish inhabitants.

Most Jewish Americans see basic liberal principles such as freedom of opinion and expression, the rule of law, and democracy not only as Jewish values but also as bulwarks against discrimination that ensure their acceptance and even survival in the United States. Yet Israel’s commitment to liberalism has always been shaky. As a Jewish state, it fosters a form of ethnic nationalism rather than a civic one, and its Orthodox Jewish citizens play an outsize role in determining how Judaism shapes Israeli life.

In 1970, the political economist Albert Hirschman wrote that members of organizations in crisis or decline have three options: “exit, voice, and loyalty.” Jewish Americans have those same options today. One camp, which arguably dominates major Jewish institutions in the United States, exhibits loyalty enabled by denial of the one-state reality. Voice is the increasingly dominant choice of Jewish Americans who were previously in the peace camp. Once focused on achieving a two-state solution, these Americans now direct their activism toward defending Palestinian rights, safeguarding the shrinking space for Israeli civil society, and resisting the dangers posed by Netanyahu’s right-wing government. Finally, there are the Jewish Americans who have chosen exit, or indifference. They simply do not think much about Israel. That might be because they do not have a strong Jewish identity or because they see Israel as misaligned with or even opposed to their values. There is some evidence that the more Israel lurches to the right, the larger this group becomes, especially among young Jewish Americans.

Reality check

So far, the Biden administration has sought to sustain the status quo while urging Israel to avoid major provocations. In response to continued settlement construction in the West Bank and other Israeli violations of international law, the United States has issued empty statements calling on Israel to avoid actions that undermine a two-state solution. But this approach misdiagnoses the problem and only makes it worse: Netanyahu’s far-right government is a symptom, not a cause, of the one-state reality, and coddling it in an attempt to coax it toward moderation will only embolden its extremist leaders by showing that they pay no price for their actions.

The United States could instead meet a radicalized reality with a radical response. For starters, Washington should banish the terms “two-state solution” and “peace process” from its vocabulary. U.S. calls for Israelis and Palestinians to return to the negotiating table rely on magical thinking. Changing the way the United States talks about the Israeli-Palestinian issue will change nothing on the ground, but it will strip away a facade that has allowed U.S. policymakers to avoid confronting reality. Washington must look at Israel as it is and not as it has been assumed to be—and act accordingly. Israel no longer even pretends to maintain liberal aspirations. The United States does not have “shared values” and should not have “unbreakable bonds” with a state that discriminates against or abuses millions of its residents based on their ethnicity and religion.

A better U.S. policy would advocate for equality, citizenship, and human rights for all Jews and Palestinians living within the single state dominated by Israel. Theoretically, such a policy would not prevent a two-state solution from being resurrected in the unlikely event that the parties moved in that direction in the distant future. But starting from a one-state reality that is morally reprehensible and strategically costly would demand an immediate focus on equal human and civil rights. A serious rejection of today’s unjust reality by the United States and the rest of the international community might also push the parties themselves to seriously consider alternative futures. The United States should demand equality now, even if the ultimate political arrangement will be up to the Palestinians and the Israelis to determine.

To that end, Washington should begin conditioning military and economic aid to Israel on clear and specific measures to terminate Israel’s military rule over the Palestinians. Avoiding such conditionality has made Washington deeply complicit in the one-state reality. Should Israel persist on its current path, the United States should consider sharply reducing aid and other privileges, perhaps even imposing smart, targeted sanctions on Israel and Israeli leaders in response to clearly transgressive actions. Israel can decide for itself what it wants to do, but the United States and other democracies can make sure it knows the costs of maintaining and even intensifying a deeply illiberal, discriminatory order.

The clearest global vision articulated by the Biden administration has been its full-throated defense of international laws and norms in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Even if one ignores the one-state reality, the same norms and values would surely be at stake in Israel and Palestine, as is widely understood across the global South. When Israel violates international laws and liberal norms, the United States should denounce Israel for those violations as it would any other state. Washington needs to stop shielding Israel in international organizations when it faces valid allegations of transgressions against international law. And it needs to refrain from vetoing UN Security Council resolutions that aim to hold Israel accountable, stop resisting Palestinian efforts to seek redress in international courts, and rally other countries to demand an end to the siege of Gaza—another supposedly temporary measure that has become a cruel and an institutionalized reality.

But the one-state reality demands more. Looked at through that prism, Israel resembles an apartheid state. Instead of exempting Israel from the strong norm against apartheid, enshrined in international law, Washington must reckon with the reality it helped create and begin viewing that reality, talking about it, and interacting with it honestly. The United States should stand up for international, Israeli, and Palestinian nongovernmental organizations, human rights organizations, and individual activists who have been demonized for courageously calling out structural injustice. Washington must protect Israeli civil society organizations that are the country’s last refuge of liberal values and Palestinian ones whose efforts will be critical to avoiding bloody conflict in the months to come. The United States should also oppose Israeli arrests of Palestinian leaders who offer a nonviolent vision of popular resistance. And it should not seek to stop or punish those who choose to peacefully boycott Israel because of its abusive policies.

Although Washington cannot prevent normalization of relations between Israel and its Arab neighbors, the United States should not lead such efforts. Nobody should be fooled by the mirage of the Abraham Accords thriving while the Palestinian issue festers. Decoupling such normalization agreements from Israel’s treatment of Palestinians has only empowered the Israeli far right and cemented Jewish supremacy within the state.

These U.S. policy changes would not immediately bear fruit. The political backlash would be fierce, even though Americans—especially Democrats—have grown far more critical of Israel than have the politicians they elect. But in the long run, these changes offer the best hope for moving toward a more peaceful and just outcome in Israel and Palestine. By finally confronting the one-state reality and taking a principled stand, the United States would stop being part of the problem and start being part of the solution.

MICHAEL BARNETT is University Professor of International Affairs and Political Science at the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University.

NATHAN J. BROWN is Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at George Washington University and a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. 

MARC LYNCH is Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at George Washington University.

SHIBLEY TELHAMI is Anwar Sadat Professor for Peace and Development at the University of Maryland and a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution.