Everything That Man Can Imagine

Yesterday's fortieth anniversary of Thomas Sankara's assumption of the Presidency of Burkina Faso was marked by the official entry of the Wagner Group from Mali into Niger, meaning that it had really been there for quite some time. Chad has come out against intervention to restore the previous Nigerien regime, and the Nigerian Senate has rejected President Bola Tinubu's request to deploy troops to Niger.

Africa has risen to end the looting of everything from Malian gold, since France has the world's fourth largest gold reserves but no goldmine except in French Guiana, to Nigerien uranium, since France has the world's highest rate of nuclear energy but no uranium, while only 18 per cent of Nigeriens have electricity at all. Not the least of Africa's overflowing natural resources are a median age of 18.5, a mean age of 19.5, and a birth rate of 4.2 per woman.

That Russia and the Wagner Group will want their cut is not, for now, seen as a problem in Africa. The Russians never colonised the place, they were the lynchpin of its liberation struggle, and they still are. By contrast, the United States did and does support the colonial powers and oppose the liberators. Whether as the Russian Federation or as the Wagner Group, the Russians will be welcome to a share of the spoils of the liberation as far as Africans were concerned. Russia earned them in the last stage of The Struggle, and it has already begun to earn them in this stage. That is how things are seen there.

France is not the only bad guy in Africa, and this uprising has notably begun under its first ever Anglo-style centrist President. Hence the silence of the likes of Black Lives Matter. Those are wholly owned subsidiaries of the Democratic Party, which is the most successful white supremacist organisation in history based on how and for how long it ran the South, and of its intercontinental network of wannabes, including the Renaissance of Emmanuel Macron.

In similar vein, the likes of Amnesty International are silent about the imprisonment of Imran Khan by the American puppet government in Pakistan. Instead, they bang on about Alexei Navalny, of whom most Russians have never heard, and whose extreme, and extremely recent, racism locates him squarely in the tradition of Joe Biden over many decades, of Kamala Harris in relation to black Californians, of Macron from Niamey to Nahel Merzouk, of Keir Starmer, and of Starmer's candidate for Mayor of the North East. Those demanding the release of Navalny, and indeed of Khan, what are you doing for Boris Kagarlitsky, and for Yurii Sheliazhenko, and of course for Julian Assange?

The World Bank has updated its estimates of GDP by Purchasing Power Parity, the critiques of which are presumably rather more agreeable to me than they are to those who may be distressed by the following. Those estimates now list Russia as the fifth largest economy in the world. China, the United States, India and Japan are still ahead of it, but Germany is in sixth place and Britain is in tenth, with Ukraine all the way down at fiftieth despite its abundance of resources. Anyone would think that it had an amazingly corrupt government.

As has Russia, but the Soviet Union used sanctions to stimulate its domestic economy, and the trick has not been forgotten on that side of the border. In any case, most of the world has not sanctioned Russia. As for the Russian and Ukrainian bombing of each other's ships, anyone would think that there were a war on. Both frontbenches at Westminster should take note. Neither of them will.

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.