Possibly Preventable?

Ah, Freddie Scappaticci. Everyone always knew. The old IRA was riddled from top to bottom with Police informants, MI5 assets, and so on, as the curious life story of Sue Gray illustrates.

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 ongoing case of the attempted murder of Detective Chief Inspector John Caldwell lends ever-more credibility to what has always been the school of thought that the New IRA was a false flag operation.

Dear old Auntie Sinn Féin herself is still so shot through, so to speak, with British Establishment payroll voters that they have first swung her behind the EU and now, if only in all but name for the time being, they have swung her behind NATO, of which whether Ireland was in fact a member has always been the non-Yes-No question that British membership of the EU has also become.

In either case, if you think that the answer is a straight "No", or even "No" at all, then you are not in the club. Sinn Féin wants to be in the club. It has lately received the President of the United States before attending the King's Coronation, so it already is. It knows the rules. Like the Greens wherever there are Greens, Sinn Féin is thoroughly gung-ho for the war in Ukraine, to which even the existing 26 County State, never mind the 32 County Republic, is not formally a party. Oh, yes, Sinn Féin is in the club, and it knows the rules.

The United Kingdom can no longer keep up any pretence to be anything other than a full participant in that war, now that British-supplied Storm Shadow cruise missiles, long-range attack drones, so-called air defence missiles, and depleted uranium, which is a weapon of mass destruction, are being deployed both by Ukraine itself and by these people. Those Russian nuclear weapons in Belarus are now pointed straight at us. We need to get the hell out of this situation while we still can, if we still can. We are not the only ones.

For example, the Irish will be doing something. They always are. If not, then what did Sinn Féin spend all those years demonstrating against? These days, it demonstrates in favour. In favour of what? "Is Ireland a member of NATO?" Notice that anyone feels the need to ask. Likewise, "Is Britain a member of the EU?" Notice that anyone feels the need to ask. Notice that Brexit is still an issue, rather than a given. The same people are behind both the Irish and the British situations.

Thus, "Brexit has failed, says Farage" is absolutely everywhere. It does not matter what Nigel Farage really meant, or even what he really said in full. He is never going to live that down. He has been in politics a very long time, so he has no excuse for having walked into this.

And since it could not now be him, then who would lead the campaign to keep out? Although it is not as if there is going to be another referendum. Well-connected commentators in their forties who were last year saying that Britain would not re-join the EU in their lifetimes are now saying "not in 20 years", which is a 50 per cent reduction. This time next year, it will be "not in 10 years".

So in 12 years' time, we are already going to be back in the EU, on absolutely any terms that it had cared to set, without a referendum, and with that reaccession's having been opposed by no party that had stood the slightest chance of providing either the Prime Minister or the Deputy Prime Minister.

The "Brexit bonfire" has been cancelled by Kemi Badenoch, so there was obviously never really going to be one. (Hers would have been the wrong one, but that is another story.) We are to remain as closely aligned as possible with EU law, but while having no say over its content, until someone, bang on cue, pointed out that that was outrageous, and therefore called for us to re-join.

Until then, as now, all parties would officially be committed to "making Brexit work". From that moment, though, they would all be committed to getting back into the EU as quickly as possible and at any cost. I shall be 46 this year. Far from my being dead before Britain stopped pretending to have left, I shall be a good decade short of retirement.

Assuming that there were anything left by then. Kosovo is back. We were right about it the first time, but the people who were wrong about it then are already wrong about it again. We said that intervention in Sierra Leone would make nothing any better, and we were right. We were right about Afghanistan. We were right about Iraq. We were right about Syria, where our enemies' humiliation is absolute. We were right about Yemen, where Saudi Arabia has made complete fools of all of those enemies, as it is also doing over Sudan, as well as over Iran, about which we were right. Why would we be wrong about Ukraine?

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 I say again that 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.