Not To Be Passed Over

In the Palestinian mind, Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre are "inseparable twins". Those who have attacked one will attack the other, and have indeed already made clear their intention to do so. They are part of the coalition that has brought Benjamin Netanyahu back to office. I remain under sentence of death from the last time, and that is the context in which Google regularly locates me in the ward of the former Leader of Durham County Council, where I am not aware that I have ever set foot.

Netanyahu depends for his parliamentary majority on people who believe that there is a religious obligation to burn down churches everywhere, since those are idolatrous. No matter how sparsely Protestant a church may be, the Divinity of Christ is in itself an idolatrous assertion, and that is why no such obligation applies to mosques in general rather to the one that happened to be where they thought that their Temple ought to be. So the church must burn. And the churches are burning in Israel and on the West Bank, although the obligation is in principle universal.

While there are now fourth generation Israelis who could not possibly be told to "go home", the State of Israel 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 yet. They became Christians when or before the Roman Empire did so, 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.

Parties that burn down their churches as a matter of religious obligation are now in government in Israel, having already provided the Israeli Ambassador to London, who in turn appeared in Liz Truss's Conservative Leadership campaign video. Having backed the wrong horse, let that Ambassador be expelled, taking with her a Labour Leader who has repeatedly paid obsequious court to her as he has made Labour Party membership conditional upon approval by an agent, who is not even a British citizen, of a church-burning and anti-miscegenation regime any criticism of which, as a breach of the IHRA Definition, would be expulsionable from the Labour Party.

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.