De Facto Leading?

Vladimir Putin will not be arrested when he visits Johannesburg for the summit of the rapidly expanding BRICS, the GDP of which is already far greater than that of the dying G7.

The only predominantly non-white countries to have sanctioned Russia are the American military colonies of Japan and South Korea, plus Taiwan if you count it. India has still yet to condemn the invasion of Ukraine. At all. Across Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean and the Pacific, bad undergraduate smirking and giggling about "anti-imperialism", or simple ignorance of the terminology, does not cut it among those who remember The Struggle, insofar as it has ever ended. They certainly remember in South Africa.

Even the BBC has to admit that Ukraine is now partially proving Putin's point that it is the threat and the aggressor. Volodymyr Zelensky never goes there, so who is running the place? Svoboda, Pravy Sektor, the National Corps, C14, the Azov Battalion, the Aidar Battalion, the Donbas Battalion, the Dnipro-1 Battalion, the Dnipro-2 Battalion, the Kraken Regiment, and all the rest of them. As ever, really. At least in their terms, Ukraine evidently functions perfectly well without Zelensky. Will he ever set foot there again?

If, and all history of these matters advises the most extreme caution, Iran really is expanding any supposed stockpile of highly enriched uranium, then most of the world would cheer it on, while the rest could hardly blame it. And even in the United States, Britain's participation in Ukraine's and its Russian Nazi proxies' war inside Russia is regarded as going too far. Dmitry Medvedev is only stating the obvious. Of course we are making ourselves a target. And no one, including the Americans, is queueing up to protect us. Yet our entire political and media elite cheers this on, and wants to make the same sort of enemy of Iran or even of China, if we have not already done so. Iran is now allied, not only to Russia, but also to Saudi Arabia.

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.