A Lot Of Smoke, But Very Little Fire?

The anti-Corbyn bandwagon made some very improbable people famous, but that was only ever going to be fleeting. Go through the MPs who left the Labour Party at least ostensibly because of Jeremy Corbyn. Not only had you never heard of them before, even though some of them had been in Parliament for decades, but nor have you heard of them since they all either stood down or lost their seats.

Professor Arif Ahmed is the new Free Speech Tsar, since the Tsars were so noted for their commitment to free speech, and that has horrified an anti-Corbyn grifter of yesteryear, one John Mann. Since 28th October 2019, back when anyone would have made such an appointment, Mann has been the Anti-Semitism Tsar, since the Tsars were so noted for their opposition to anti-Semitism.

But it is no longer about bogus claims of anti-Semitism; the EHRC found all of two specific examples, and both of those are subject to judicial review. It is now about mostly bogus threats to free speech; nothing gets you a platform like being deplatformed. So Professor Ahmed's non-subscription to the IHRA Definition is a positive advantage. Except to Mann, who is a creature out of time. Similarly, The Times and the Daily Telegraph have given rave reviews to Roger Waters. The world moves on.

There is a forlorn attempt to revive the glory days against Jamie Driscoll, but even within the Labour Party, no one is joining in who has ever been elected to anything. Shadow Ministers "do not know the details of the case". Oh, yes, they do. Andy Burnham, Steve Rotheram, the Labour members of Jamie's Cabinet, and the entire trade union bureaucracy, are lined up with Simon Clarke, Nadhim Zahawi, Ben Bradley, and the Conservative members of Jamie's Cabinet.

Someone called Paul Richards has to come on the BBC and accuse Ken Loach of having said "odious and repulsive things", but no one asks him what they were, because they know that he would have no answer. Did a hall full of 2000 anti-Semites give Ken a 15-minute standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival? The third episode of The Labour Files is The Hierarchy, about the hierarchy of racism in the Labour Party, and it recently 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. Nor is the Cannes Film Festival. And nor is Ken.

Kim McGuinness has adopted the novel election-winning strategy of going into purdah. It will be a preferential voting system for Mayor. If Jamie did not win on the first round, then he would win on the second. Keir Starmer's Labour Party is going to be humiliated from the left, a few months before the General Election. Let's keep up that momentum.

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.