Stockholm Syndrome

Bibby Stockholm is obviously someone's drag name. But whose, and why? Stephen Kinnock's, perhaps? Even a Kinnock could perform the task that this one has been paid to complete, and confirm the Official Opposition's support for the barge, thereby enabling that floating Grenfell Tower to start piling up its kindling.

Not sending people to Rwanda may be replaced with not sending them to Ascension Island. Then again, it may not be. And the increased fines for employing illegal immigrants, or for renting to them, are an admission that the measures up to now have been a failure.

In the right-wing media's own terms, Suella Braverman barely manages to talk the talk, much less does she walk the walk. A white man like her would be torn to pieces by the Daily Telegraph, the Daily Mail and GB News. How very woke they are.

The Stop The Boats demonstrators against the Bibby Stockholm are GB News viewers. 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.

Yet there is a concerted campaign to take down GB News before the Election campaign began in earnest. That may not moisten the eyes of those of us who, despite holding a position vastly more common in the population at large, could not begin to dream of a Freeview channel. But it is notable, in the way that the debanking both of Nigel Farage and of Gina Miller is notable, welcoming them and theirs to our world, and making the case for the revival of Post Office accounts, for a far greater role for the State in the sector, and so on.

What impact have the "populist" outlets had? Any ostensible shift away from gender self-identification has been by a party that was not in government. Meanwhile, the governing party continues to enforce it, without anything so vulgar as a parliamentary vote. That is no doubt as true of the Home Office as it is of any other Department of State. Someone ought to look into that. The whole concept has arisen only under the Conservatives. It was unknown in 2010, or even in 2015.

As to what has inspired the unreliable Labour change of heart, who knows? The number of actual votes cast for Labour has gone through the floor under Keir Starmer, so any increase may be the only ever sign that #LabourLosingWomen was anything more than a hashtag. Or it may be any of 100 other things.

At 45, I had always assumed that we would win this one in my lifetime. But I am less and less certain. The other side enjoys the full force of the State and of a cultural sector that it very largely funds. That double force was what turned England from, in 1530, an extravagantly Catholic country of many centuries' standing, to, by 1560, a country that would define itself as fundamentally anti-Catholic for the next 400 years. Again I say that that State is the Tory State, there having been no other for as long as the notion of gender self-identification has existed. There is no suggestion of a Government Bill or amendment to enact into law the rhetoric of Braverman, of Kemi Badenoch, or, almost but pointedly not quite, of Rishi Sunak.

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.