Insoumise

Emmanuel Macron is demonstrating how violently authoritarian "centrism" is when challenged, and how racist it is fundamentally, both of which are foretastes of any Starmer Government that we might ever have the misfortune to suffer. The authoritarianism has already begun explicitly under Rishi Sunak, and the racism is at least implicit, with the same people at the bottom of the Conservative Party's hierarchy of racism at at the bottom of the Labour Party's.

Marine Le Pen is the dynastic standard-bearer for a continuously minoritarian tradition that regards the French Republic as illegitimate. That can make it through to the second round of a Presidential Election, but it can never win one, no matter what the political issues of the day. The other candidate is bound to defeat it and become President. In 2022, that should have been Jean-Luc Mélenchon. In 2027, it absolutely must be.

Last year, enough of Mélenchon's supporters decided that Macron was the lesser evil. But he was not, and it is now beyond dispute that he is not; he is just a different evil, when he is even that. It came as no surprise when Macron's supporters gave two of the six Vice-Presidencies of the National Assembly to Le Pen's. In my day, and no doubt still, A-level History students had to unlearn the GCSE fiction that Nazism had been a working-class phenomenon. Nor is Fascism a product of traditional conservatism, whatever alliances it may forge, or whatever symbolism it may adopt.

Consider the direction of Justin Trudeau's Canada. Consider the tendencies of Sunak and of Joe Biden, whose long record is terrifying. Consider the records of Stamer and of Kamala Harris. Consider to whom and to what Mario Draghi has ceded. Such is the Franco-American republican tradition that arose from the international transmission of English Whiggery through the Masonic Lodges.

The liberal bourgeoisie keeps Fascism in reserve for when it might ever face any serious demand to share its economic or social power with anyone who did not have it before the rise of the bourgeois liberal order, or to share its cultural or political power with anyone at all. Mélenchon poses such a threat. Let battle commence.

And not only in France. 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 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.