Fall Guys?

As nearly 10,000 photographs from Hunter Biden's once supposedly non-existent laptop were published online, his father's fall looked like something out of the last days of the Soviet Union. But for 50 years, if you have wanted to know the exact middle point of the Democratic Party at any given time, then you have needed to look no further than Joe Biden. For that long, he has marked the pulse of what has always been the beating heart of liberal interventionism.

So if your liberal interventionism has gone beyond even Biden's, then you know that it has gone too far. And such is indeed the Biden Administration's attitude to Britain's participation in Ukraine's and its Russian Nazi proxies' war inside Russia, where they are deploying 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. Ministers of the Crown take to the BBC to mention quite casually that there were more British Special Forces in Ukraine than those of any other NATO member-state. Since when were such matters discussed in public?

Nor can bad undergraduate sniggering and giggling, or simple ignorance of the terminology, make a conflict anti-colonial and anti-imperialist if pretty much the whole of what were once known as the Three Continents says that it is not. 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. That includes predominantly non-white Israel. Neoconservatives and National Conservatives alike, think on.

There may be British Special Forces in Ukraine, but there is no President Volodymyr Zelensky there. In his permanent absence, it is being run by 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. Like Vladimir Putin's depiction of Ukraine as the threat and the aggressor, his talk of de-Nazification can no longer be dismissed. Except, of course, by the entire British political class.

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.