By Mutual Agreement?

I had never watched a whole professional football match until the men's European Championships of 2021, during the same period that successive padmates and I were very fond of Countdown. I was good at the wordy bits, while they, although by their own admission men of limited formal education, were good at the sums. Yes, of course I know why. Not least because they well and truly told me.

In December of that year, the law turned out to be that Rachel Riley had at least condoned physical violence against Jeremy Corbyn, and that she must have known what the reaction would be, but that that reaction had still been libellous because she was on the telly and thus a Very Important Person, far more important than a mere Member of Parliament and Privy Councillor.

Her programme is shown at a time when anyone with a normal job cannot watch it, yet this telly dolly, accurately described in a comment on a previous post as "this talking pair of breasts", has deprived a working-class woman and her baby daughter of their livelihood. You either went to Thorpe Hall School and then completed an internship at Deutsche Bank, or you did not. Thorpe Hall School, where the fees are currently £15,084 per year plus extras, with a grand's deposit merely to accept a place. And an internship at Deutsche Bank, because who needs to be paid? What are Mummy and Daddy for?

If Mason Greenwood secured employment in any jurisdiction other than the United Kingdom, Ireland, Jersey, Guernsey, the Isle of Man, Gibraltar, Belize or Paraguay, then we would know that the recording of him was a fake, as we already did from the fact that the Crown Prosecution Service had not proceeded with what would have been an open-and-shut case if it had been genuine.

Manchester United, which may look forward to a well-deserved hit to and from its huge African fanbase, has "concluded that the material posted online did not provide a full picture and that Mason did not commit the offences in respect of which he was originally charged." So what did he do? Is this about that business in Iceland, or what? That was very bad, but social media claims that Greenwood and Phil Foden had brought "sex workers" into their hotel room are simply made up. They brought in girls whom they had picked up. During Covid-19 restrictions. And they were rightly punished for it at the time.

There was no "backlash" against the plan to reintegrate Greenwood. There was a tiny demonstration, and there was a lot of foot-stamping on Twitter, mostly by one person. Guess who? Greenwood's class, sex and colour make him the sort of person that the economic changes that began with the Labour Budget of December 1976 have enabled people of Riley's class, sex and colour to harness the power of the State to dominate and persecute. In any one or more of class, sex and colour terms, whom do you more closely resemble? Greenwood? Or Riley? And even if your answer is the latter, if you feel anything like the Christian duty to stand with the oppressed, then which of them is that?

It has always been One Struggle. The slave trade financed enclosure, and nothing has changed. Riley is a cheerleader for a political party that exhibits Anglo-Saxon capitalism's visceral fear of the black male of African descent, with only three such Labour MPs, two such Labour Peers, and 81 such Labour Councillors. There has been no such member of Labour's National Executive Committee, or Labour member of the London Assembly, in more than 20 years. Greenwood's successful impregnation of his more than averagely attractive white girlfriend is the ultimate red rag to the Bull Connor, a Democratic National Committeeman whom Riley's beloved Keir Starmer strikingly resembles. Riley is a stereotypical, if ageing, Dixiecrat belle, who has moved on from seeking to incite the assassination of a left-wing populist politician, to seeking to incite the lynching of a black man on the classic trumped-up charge of having raped a white woman.

Consider the recent cries of A-level grade inflation. In the blue corner, there was an alliance of those who abominated above all else the very thought of the schools attended by 94 per cent of the population, and those who would never be satisfied with anything short of confirmation that they had been cheated of the glittering lives to which their obvious genius ought to have entitled them. But over in the shocking (not pale) pink corner, there were those by whom working-class pupils were twice as likely to be predicted an E grade, and by whom black pupils' grades were staggeringly under-predicted, with only 39 per cent of predictions turning out to have been correct, while boys were also endemically ill-served. Here we are again. It has always been One Struggle.

Do the right wings of nominally leftish parties hate black men for looking like Palestinians, or hate Palestinians for looking like black men? Both, of course. Numerous figures, including Starmer, exemplify that as well as Riley does, but none does so better. All 16 of their body cameras malfunctioned as Israeli policemen branded the Star of David onto the face of a Palestinian who was certainly of the same sex as Greenwood or the uproar would be audible even to the London media, who was probably of much the same age, and who was of a much more similar colour to him than Riley was.

To side with Riley on anything is to side with this branding, and with everything else like it, while to remain neutral is to be complicit. There is therefore a moral and political obligation to side with Greenwood. Those suggesting picketing Channel 4 in support of Greenwood are onto something, but that ought already to have been happening over this branding, as it should whenever anything like that happened, which is a very great deal of the time. Speaking of Channel 4, watch out for Channel 4 News to repeat the BBC's line that the conviction of Lucy Letby was unsound. The people who are saying this, and who thought that Carla Foster ought never to have been charged, are exactly the same people who support the sacking of Greenwood.

Greenwood does not "deserve a second chance". He is still on his first chance. He should never have been suspended on the basis of mere allegation, a pernicious practice that the Rileys of the world are now trying to impose even on Parliament, in order to empower the likes of Jess Phillips, another professional racist, to get rid of any MP whom they wished to replace with someone else of their own choosing through the tightly controlled selection processes in all parties.

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 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.