And Look What Happens

Ah, my late father's hometown. I was driven along a Lindsay Road, where my confederate assured me that a dearly departed co-conspirator had once lived. As a very good Malbec slipped down to the sound of the fireworks that closed the Tattoo, I was assured that those sections of the Generally Sound Left which had supported Scottish independence in 2014 were now opposed to a second referendum, and would vote No in any such event. Nicola Sturgeon has had a profound influence. If there was any trouble with the train home, then I had lunched too well on the Royal Mile to have noticed. Those who suspect Jamie Driscoll's General Soundness, he has been endorsed by the RMT, which has become the lodestar that the NUM used to be, but without the inconvenience of affiliation to the Labour Party.

Honestly, I go away for a few days, and look what happens. Horrendous though his domestic policies are, on foreign policy Vivek Ramaswamy, who will with any luck be Donald Trump's running mate, has turned out to be better than Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and comparable to Cornel West. There can be no higher compliment than to be accused of having no foreign policy experience or expertise by the likes of Nikki Haley, who will certainly vote for Joe Biden in the end. Supporters of Trump, Kennedy and West are all now in an existential struggle. In its second term, the Biden Administration would use the full force of the unitary executive theory to destroy them by any means necessary, setting the pattern for the pursuit of dissidents across the Western world, in most of which, including Britain, such destruction would be constitutionally far easier to pursue than it would be in the United States. Honestly, I go away for a few days, and look what happens.

Fani Willis is keeping the black defendants locked up. You have to be quite the Uncle Tom to support Biden, who was Strom Thurmond's eulogist, who restored the federal death penalty, who was the father of the prison-industrial complex, who opposed bussing because he did not want his children to grow up in a "racial jungle", and who served as Vice President throughout the Obama Administration's mass deportations, its caging of children, and its wars. Kamala Harris locked up African-American men as if it had been going out of fashion, and she kept them locked up as cheap labour for her corporate donors. When Willis grows up, she wants to be Harris. Honestly, I go away for a few days, and look what happens.

The death of Yevgeny Prigozhin has brought out all manner of MI6 operatives. Alicia Kearns chairs the Foreign Affairs Select Committee at only 35 and having entered Parliament only in 2019. As for Christopher Steele, his ludicrous "dossier" accused Trump of everything up, or down, to being under Russian control due to the existence of a video of his being urinated upon by prostitutes. It is to this liar (not a fantasist, since a fantasist believes what he is saying) that we are expected to defer. Honestly, I go away for a few days, and look what happens.

Dedollarisation and BRICS expansion continue apace, while, for all the undeniable ghastliness of the Modi regime, the news that India has made it to the Moon is wonderful for the human race. Still, we do need the specification in the Statute Law that the United Kingdom's aid to any given country be reduced by the exact cost of any space programme, or of any nuclear weapons programme, or of any nuclear submarine programme, or of any foreign aid budget of that country's own, but with the money thus saved remaining within what we are once again going to have to patronise the world by calling the Overseas Aid budget, and with the 0.7 per cent target still resolutely intact. Honestly, I go away for a few days, and look what happens.

Mike Pompeo confirmed that the Trump Administration had conspired with the Parliamentary Labour Party and with the party's staff to prevent its then Leader, Jeremy Corbyn, from becoming Prime Minister. Exceedingly few Labour MPs, and no Labour Party staffer, could have said anything about Trump then, or could do so now. In a similar spirit, the fake charity that calls itself the Campaign Against Antisemitism, which played a central role in the scam that has since been torn to shreds by the studiously ignored Forde Report and by the internationally award-winning The Labour Files, has turned out, as if there had ever been any doubt, to be a front for the Jewish National Fund, a nice-sounding name for the people behind this, this, this, this and this. Honestly, I go away for a few days, and look what happens.

The intellectual guiding light of the faction that controls the Labour Party, once allied to Trump and still allied to Itamar Ben-Gvir, is Racist Riley, who continues her class and race war against Mason Greenwood. Those who are hailing Rachel Riley as a feminist heroine should challenge her to define a woman, but she would be as horrified at multicoloured working-classness and at unapologetic male heterosexuality from the West Stand as she would be on the West Bank, if she knew where either of those was. Good luck to you if you enjoy women's football, but its promotion as the "good" football has nothing to do with the offside rule. Honestly, I go away for a few days, and look what happens.

Meanwhile, Riley decrees that, "The only people in a position to ever assert guilt or innocence are trained, qualified, experienced experts. This goes far beyond the scope of what Man United were tasked with" by Her Off Countdown. She has apparently never heard of juries, nor does she consider the Crown Prosecution Service to be made up of "trained, qualified, experienced experts", at least compared to Her Off Countdown or to whoever she would depute for this purpose. We all know who those would be, and what their assertion of guilt or innocence would be, since no one would pay you to be a witchfinder unless you found witches. When has any of them ever asserted innocence? Greenwood must be reinstated unconditionally, and the publicly owned Channel 4 must insist to ITV Studios, which makes Countdown, that Riley be dismissed. Honestly, I go away for a few days, and look what happens.

Riley is practically certain to be one of the 100 Peers that Keir Starmer intended to create in order to staff his Government, since he believed that only 10 Labour MPs were capable of being Ministers, and fascinatingly neither thought that the existing Labour Peers would do, nor expected the obsessively rigged selection process to deliver any improvement in the calibre of the PLP. Whatever you think of ULEZ, Starmer's determination to destroy Sadiq Khan is because Khan was on a London Borough Council 29 years ago, he entered Parliament 18 years ago, and he has attended Cabinet. As for Andy Burnham, he has been the mighty Secretary of State for Health. Starmer's fear is obvious to all five senses. All that Starmer has ever done has been knowingly to have kept the innocent Andrew Malkinson in prison for 13 years while not prosecuting Jimmy Savile, a decision for which he was responsible even in the wildly unlikely event that he played no part in it, and while not prosecuting the killers of Ian Tomlinson and Jean Charles de Menezes, decisions that he took directly and personally. Honestly, I go away for a few days, and look what happens.

The Savile business should be seen alongside the fact that Peter Wilby was previously the live-in lover of Starmer's closest adviser, and Jeffrey Epstein's closest British associate, Peter Mandelson. Prince Andrew has never run so much as his own bath. It was Mandelson who stayed at Epstein's apartment while Epstein was an incarcerated sex offender and Mandelson was a Cabinet Minister. First Secretary of State, in fact. Deputy Prime Minister in all but name. This post is this site's thirty-second mention of the connection between Mandelson and Epstein, with the first having been as long ago as 16th August 2019, and with most of these posts having been substantially the same as comments on Guido Fawkes. Yet no one seems to think that this is news, even though Mandelson is the star turn at major right-wing Labour fundraising events, and even though he would undoubtedly be in any Cabinet of Starmer's, probably as Deputy Prime Minister in name, and certainly as such in practice. Even from his cell, Epstein was still making donations to "Petie". And now, Petie's ex-partner, who would also have been one of the 100 Peers, has been convicted of having had 167 indecent images of children, including 22 of their being subjected to penetration, bestiality or sadism. Honestly, I go away for a few days, and look what happens.

Starmer has accepted more freebies than all other Labour Leaders since 1997 put together. With practically no remaining members, the Labour Party has turned out to be awash with bribes from arms companies, gambling companies, the private healthcare companies that were looking to loot England's NHS under Wes Streeting, and the sort of things, including the oil companies, that ought to be in public ownership, as well as from Palantir, the CIA spyware company that is to sponsor next month's Labour Party Conference. Yes, really. Honestly, I go away for a few days, and look what happens.

Accordingly, Labour will do nothing beyond the pitiful energy cap, even though the standing charge is 50 times the cost of maintaining the networks. Rachel Reeves has ruled out a wealth tax even though a tax of one to two per cent on assets above £10 million could abolish the two-child benefit cap 17 times over, while merely taxing each of Britain's 173 billionaires down to one billion pounds per head would raise £1.1 trillion. What do you mean, they would leave? Where would they go, to get the deal that they currently had here? Come on. Where, exactly? Honestly, I go away for a few days, and look what happens.

The other lot put George Osborne in charge of something and it went belly up after people just took whatever they fancied and flogged it off for buttons on the side. I mean, who could have seen that coming? Osborne's long-time Chief of Staff and then Evening Standard employee, Rupert Harrison, is on the Economic Advisory Council and has been selected as the Conservative parliamentary candidate for Bicester and Woodstock. The Tufton Street network has published its accounts, which are in dollars, since this is a foreign-funded and largely foreign-staffed project that uses England as its experimental laboratory because all the parties here let it, as could not happen anywhere else in the world. Between five and 10 per cent of Britain's entire trade deal with India is to benefit Infosys, which is owned by the father-in-law of our own dear Prime Minister, who has himself been found "inadvertently" to have failed to have disclosed his wife's shares in a company that had benefited from one of his changes in government policy. Honestly, I go away for a few days, and look what happens.

"You have demeaned your office, Rishi Sunak," says Nadine Dorries, who as a sitting Member of Parliament went on television and ate an ostrich's anus. Why did she not wait to say all of this, no doubt in the Mail on Sunday, on the eve of the Conservative Party Conference? That would have been much better publicity for her book. Something here has not gone according to plan. Having been behind the Online Safety Bill, as a skiver Dorries was not an active member of the Right. Still, on the basis of her epistle, which is longer than several of Saint Paul's, she ought now to contest the Mid Bedfordshire by-election. What larks. Honestly, I go away for a few days, and look what happens.

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 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.