Spit Hood

Hunting council estate boys for sport. Locking up protestors and mere passers by at the Coronation. Tasering a 91-year-old black woman and putting a mesh spit hood over her head. Shooting two dogs. Arresting Kit Klarenberg and interrogating him for five hours about his political opinions. They are already preparing for Keir Starmer and for Yvette Cooper, even with the better part of a year and a half to go.

Starmer whipped abstentions on the Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Act and on the Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Act, neither of which he would repeal, and between which nothing that either Freddie Scappaticci or Wayne Couzens did would now be illegal. Couzens used his valid warrant card, and his Police issue handcuffs, so nothing that he did with them could ever now be a criminal offence.

Why enact those measures, or the Public Order Act, or the Nationality and Borders Act, or the Elections Act, or the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act? Why seek to enact the Online Safety Bill, or the Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Bill, or the National Security Bill? Why empower the Home Secretary to strip people of their British citizenship without having to give any reason, and even if that rendered them stateless, and now without even having to tell them?

The only possible reason is so that those powers should be used. Where they already exist, then they are already being used. Labour would not repeal any of them. It would use them to their full extent, and it would turn a blind eye when they were exceeded, if they could be.

The Rwanda scheme was never designed to be implemented. It was designed to annoy all the right people, either by existing in theory, or by never coming to pass, apparently in capitulation to the first lot. But the monster detailed in The Starmer Project does not play games, and nor does the Wicked Witch of the Work Capability Assessment. Only Paul Kagame's financial relationship with Tony Blair might permit any of their victims to dream of the luxury of Rwanda.

The concerted redefinition of contempt of court to include unstated but obvious appeals to juries to exercise their right of nullification is both a recognition of the increasing prevalence of political prosecutions, and a preparation for the restoration of capital punishment. A preparation for Starmer and Cooper, indeed. As Director of Public Prosecutions, he will have caused thousands of deaths. The legacy of her time as Work and Pensions Secretary is a daily rising body count of hundreds of thousands. All as intentional acts of the State.

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.

Professor Sakia Sassen and I have already called publicly for the scalp of the night: "As a Commonwealth citizen who is not serving a term of imprisonment in the United Kingdom or in the Republic of Ireland, Julian Assange is eligible to contest a British General Election. We hope that he will do so for the seat of Holborn and St Pancras, which is presently occupied by Keir Starmer. We hope that he will be elected. And we hope that the neighbouring constituency of Islington North will return its Member of Parliament since 1983, Jeremy Corbyn."

Moreover, Cooper was first elected in 1997 with a majority of 15,246, and it was 14,499 as recently as 2017, but last time it fell from that to 1,276. In 2024, it will be high time to say goodbye and good riddance.