Death, Destruction and Exploitation?

Three cheers for anyone who tells Victoria Nuland where to stick it. Three cheers for General Abdourahmane Tchiani of Niger. "Death, destruction and exploitation" follow the Wagner Group wherever it goes, says Antony Blinken. So they do. But the Wagner Group is hardly unique in that, Mr United States Secretary of State.

And the failed attempt to keep Russia and the Wagner Group from aiding the Nigerien Revolution, the hugely popular expulsion of colonial military forces so as to end the colonial theft of the most valuable natural resource, has come from al-Qaeda and Boko Haram. If you must pick a side, then do not pick that one. Then again, the West in general, and the Anglos in particular, always do. 

We tried to give them Syria. We gave then Libya, bordering Niger. Whatever we were trying to do in Iraq, it gave them cause to attack us on our own streets, and it created the so-called Islamic State. We invented the idea of Kosovo as a state so that they could have it. We are openly arming a side that contains them in Ukraine, where, unprecedently, we are more or less open about the fact that our Special Forces are fighting alongside them.

We created them in Afghanistan, and when we finally had the wit to pull out of the place, then we left them hardware beyond their wildest dreams, yet now we have the gall to complain about the situation there. This list is far from exhaustive. The glimmer of hope is the shift in the position of Saudi Arabia, which has hitherto been lubricating all of this by pumping the cash like oil.

Both Foreign Office frontbenches are the usual collection of people who have been groomed into all of this from their undergraduate days or earlier, and people who have think that "Niger" is either French for "Nigeria" or a spelling mistake, not necessarily of "Nigeria", while Burkina Faso is a made up place, and Boko Haram is a restaurant.

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.