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.