Temporary Emergency Use?

Priti Patel is wielding the knife against Suella Braverman. She does not realise that if the Home Office has been planning this use of RAF camps for five years, then it was planning it while she was Home Secretary, but that is par for the course from her, as it would be from Braverman. The Right is now out to rid itself of Braverman, thereby rendering the nation the service of ridding us all of her.

Like Patel before her, Braverman prefers Ukrainians to Afghans because Ukrainians "look like us", and where does one even begin with that? Ukrainians, in turn, do not necessarily dislike Islamists. Via NATO Turkey, IS fighters are now in Ukraine on the side of the Zelensky regime. What sympathy refugees from the Taliban might have for them is, however, a different question. But Ukraine does have to find fighting men from somewhere. A startling number of the Ukrainians in Britain are men of fighting age. And now it turns out that every regional commissar in Ukraine has been taking bribes not to conscript them. Meanwhile, it is the women and children who have already started to go back. Just think about that.

Jimmy Perry created the character of Private Walker for himself, but David Croft declined to cast him. They and the original audience of Dad's Army knew what Walker was. A spiv in his thirties was in the Home Guard because he had paid someone off. As with looting, or as with the rampant promiscuity during the War, that generation was adept at saying it without saying it.

But never did every recruitment sergeant in the land have to be kicked out for such crookedness. Ukraine's fabulous natural wealth translates into the poorest country in Europe, being President of which can nevertheless take a man from being a stand-up comedian to being a dollar billionaire. It is no wonder that men buy their way out of potentially dying for that, and it is no wonder that they would want to.

Yet the United States sends it cluster bombs, because the Bidens' wealth is as screamingly suspicious as Volodymyr Zelensky's, and it also leads back to Ukraine. Joe Biden became a United States Senator at the constitutional minimum age of 30, and he remained one until he became Vice President at 66. He was out of office for only four years, in old age. Both of his wives have been schoolteachers. But look at him now, already waging the early stages of a Third World War for at least one of the tainted sources of his lucre.

The only alternative to this cannot be a Second American Civil War under Donald Trump, whose enemies cannot see the true effect of their indictments. And it is clear who our candidate cannot be. Rather it is Cornel West who has all of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s good points, as well as some of his own, but not all of Kennedy's bad points.

If anything, Britain is even worse, supplying Ukraine with the weapon of mass destruction that is depleted uranium, and doing so on a cross-party basis that includes Braverman's National Conservatives and Patel's Conservative Democratic Organisation alongside Labour, the Liberal Democrats, the SNP, the Greens, the lot. Labour's response to the plague ship, as much a threat to the staff as to anyone else, is to demand more barges, each of them costing £400 million per year to rent when it would cost only £50 million to buy. Braverman and the provenly bent Robert Jenrick agree. Round and round the money goes.

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 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.