Changing Channels

There is a concerted campaign to take down GB News before 2024, but that station will go into its first General Election as the media Right goes into every General Election, urging its audience to vote for a party that it had spent the previous years lacerating as a bunch of weaklings, backsliders, traitors and sell-outs. Nigel Farage endorsed hundreds of Conservative candidates last time, so why not?

Not that Farage retains much interest in Britain. His new primetime show is advertising for a specialist producer – America, for a guest booker – America, and for a specialist researcher – America. Farage is getting ready for the return of Donald Trump, who would issue an Executive Order that all federal departments conduct relations with the United Kingdom through him. Do you doubt that that could happen?

Against Joe Biden's ongoing Third World War, and his economic programme that had caused the United States to lose its Triple A credit rating, if not Trump, then who? The position of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Israel and Palestine is an absolute disqualification, and in any case he is not going to be on the ballot. Our candidate is Cornel West. Florida's literal bowdlerisation refutes that his membership of the Board of Academic Advisors of the Classic Learning Test connected him to Ron DeSantis, who is also not going to be on the ballot.

The developments in Hillsborough County, the seventh largest school district in the United States, come as no surprise to those of us who have never not been cancelled. We have always known who had invented cancel culture. What colour is a snowflake? You would rapidly find out if you mentioned that the Thatcherite heartlands had voted Remain. Or that Suella Braverman had never actually done anything as Home Secretary, just as Priti Patel never did. Or that there had always been a spirited debate on immigration. Or that Boris Johnson had abolished the requirement that jobs in Britain be advertised first in Britain. Or that Liz Truss had wanted freedom of movement with the most populous country in the world.

Or that it had been the supposedly infallible money markets that had brought down Truss at the mere suggestion of what those whom this fact tiggered had always noisily insisted were the only intellectually valid economic policies. Or that the Conservatives had been in government throughout the period of the Northern Ireland Protocol, the Windsor Framework, Net Zero, gender self-identification, the lockdowns, and vaccine passports, each with either a negligible Commons rebellion or simply no vote. In 2019, Farage endorsed that party in 359 constituencies, easily enough for an overall majority.

In Britain, the cancel culture snowflakes take an average of six per cent of the vote in the few wards where they can find 10 people to sign their nomination papers, and they lost their deposits at all three of the recent by-elections. Yet even if no one watches one of them, they have two Freeview channels. Two. Meanwhile, the rest of the broadcast news media are in the hands of the people who, when they stood as themselves in a blaze of publicity and without any pretended roots in any other political tradition, came out of the 2019 European Elections with all of three per cent of the vote.

I for one will continue to work to create a thinktank, a weekly magazine of news and comment, a monthly cultural review, a quarterly academic journal, and perhaps eventually a fortnightly satirical magazine, all in the service of the other 91 per cent. In good, old-fashioned print, so that no one would be able to press a button and delete them. The thinktank and the weekly magazine need to be up and running at the start of the forthcoming General Election year.

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.