Nothing Has Stopped

Of course the Wagner Group is still recruiting in its own right. The people who hated it, liked it for a day, and now hate it again, have no idea what they are talking about. I have been politically active since the big story in foreign policy was the breakup of Yugoslavia. Those people had no idea what they were talking about then, and they still do not.

In the meantime, they have had no idea what they were talking about when it came to Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, or anywhere else at all. Right now, they have no idea what they are talking about when to comes to Iran, to Sudan, to Ukraine, to several parts of China, or to Russia, where they are obsessed with someone called Alexei Navalny, of whom no one in Russia has ever heard, much as they imagined someone called Juan Guaidó to be the rightful President of Venezuela, and possibly still do. They could not, however, locate Venezuela on a map. Such is our permanent Government.

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.