Affluence, Influence, Inference

In what way is Andrew Tate influential? Cite a specific example of his influence. He would hate me, because I would laugh at him so long and so hard that I would probably require hospital treatment.

Still, "I had no police record until I made a record," said Tupac Shakur. When Tate became, if not influential, then famous for being so, and rich on the back of that, then he became a target. I am no fan of ostentatious displays of wealth, but the United States would never have allowed a white liberal American citizen to have been treated as Tate has been by the NATO member state of Romania.

On a tiny scale, I have some experience of these matters. Early in 2017, it looked as if I might finally win a seat on Durham County Council, and the Teaching Assistants' adoption of my strategy of supporting the best placed candidate against Labour in each ward, as advocated on the letters page of the Northern Echo by signatories including George Galloway, looked as if it might deprive Labour of control of that authority after more than a century.

But the TAs followed Ben Sellers instead, so Labour held on, and it did exactly as it had threatened. By the time that the next elections to Durham County Council came round, when Labour did indeed lose power, then I was in prison. Although if Ben believes in my guilt, then he is the only person of that mind of whom I have ever so much as heard. Ben should make himself useful by arranging for his People's Bookshop in Durham to show Oh, Jeremy Corbyn: The Big Lie, preferably once the university term had started.

That would trigger the safeguarding-industrial complex, as is always worth doing for its own sake. The Labour Party is advertising for a Safeguarding Officer. Nick Brown should apply for it, thereby challenging the party to explain why his appointment would be "inappropriate". Or he might apply for the yet again readvertised position of Senior Administrator of the Safeguarding Office of the Diocese of Hexham and Newcastle. As might I.

But in the English-speaking West, liberal Catholic apparatchiki are always right-wing Labourites or their equivalents, and comprise at least a very large and powerful minority within those factions on at least three continents. The Bidens are quite typical. Anyone who voted for Joe Biden next year would be nothing but a selfish spoiler for Cornel West, and would effectively be voting for a Republican nominee who would at best be Donald Trump. Likewise, any future Labour Government would be staffed and surrounded very largely by people like Hunter Biden, such as turned up in Diocesan Safeguarding Offices.

Thankfully, though, 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.