Their Name Is Legion

If Niger is a democracy, then it is not much of an advertisement for democracy, always among the poorest countries in the world, and depending on the index often at the very bottom.

But in a crowded field, Françafrique has no more egregious injustice than the fact that only 18 per cent of uranium-rich Niger's population has electricity while France has the highest rate of nuclear energy in the world. At that lowest point, the uprising has begun.

Francophone Africa will no longer tolerate its underdevelopment while it is dotted with all those French bases, plus plenty of American ones including at least six in Niger, permanent ones at Agadez and Niamey, and theoretically temporary ones at Arlit, Dirkou, Diffa and Ouallam.

Those bases are supposed to be fighting al-Qaeda and, in the form of Boko Haram, the so-called Islamic State. But it was the Wagner Group that al-Qaeda tried and failed to keep from entering Niger. That and the Russian Federation are fighting it and IS there as in Syria and, since its fighters have entered it via NATO Turkey, in Ukraine.

Ah, yes, that other poster boy, where all military commissars, in charge of the call-up, have just been dismissed for corruption by the same Volodymyr Zelensky who has ordered the evacuation of Kupyansk. Joe Biden has asked Congress, which will agree, to send that regime an extra $24 billion while giving only $12 billion, half as much, to disaster relief for the American citizens of Hawaii, only 22.9 per cent of whom, not even one in four, "look like us". 37 million almost entirely white Ukrainians enjoy a largesse unimaginable by a comparable 41 million American descendants of African slavery. For example, Cornel West.

As America has Kamala Harris, whose inarticulacy and whose fondness for the mass incarceration of black men make her Biden's natural successor, so Britain, having had Priti Patel, has Suella Braverman. Under Braverman, as under Patel, the Right gives the Home Office a free pass, both on wokery, which it exhibits no less than any other Department of State, and on spending, such as the £400 million per year to rent a barge that it would cost only £50 million to buy.

To cap it all, the Bibby Stockholm turns out to be a plague ship, awash with Legionella bacteria that, if this is what matters to you, the staff can also contract. Braverman returned to office one week after having been sacked for a major breach of security. Just what does she have to do? Yet what are we offered as an alternative? Yvette Cooper, who makes Braverman or Patel look like the Tooth Fairy, and Stephen Kinnock, who wants there be several more of these barges.

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.