A Systemic Challenge

It's a China week, is it? Russia last week, and Russia next week, so China this week. All to frighten us into submitting to the Online Safety Bill and all the rest of it. In what specific way is China a threat to Britain? A threat to do what, exactly? If you are lining up with Liz Truss, then you need to have a word with yourself.

Truss has always been her own circus, but David Lindsay Promotions proudly presents The Fight of the Century, an American Bully XL versus Suella Braverman. Betting closed. The Save Are Statue's brigade will hate this ban, while the likes of The Guardian will find themselves having to side with Braverman. A lot of people are going to be very confused, and that will be before anyone realised that the Ministerial responsibility here resided not with Braverman at all, but with Thérèse Coffey, whose name has never inspired a sense of reassurance.

But if you can compartmentalise, then you are never confused. I know for a fact that a sitting Conservative MP, who of course intends to vote Conservative, has already placed a bet on Jeremy Corbyn's winning the First Past the Post election for Mayor of London. Everyone knows that Labour is going to come third. A few months before the General Election, Labour is going to come third in London and in the North East on the same night. Jamie Driscoll is certainly going to win up here. And Conservative MPs are already betting on Corbyn down there.

If Corbyn had become Prime Minister, then we know that there would have been a military coup, because the Army had openly said so. It would have been our 1973, which is not "the other 9/11", but pointedly the only one that, at least outside the United States, anyone ever mentions anymore. 50 years ago today, Salvador Allende probably shot himself with an AK-47 that he had been given by Fidel Castro. Augusto Pinochet's old friend, Margaret Thatcher, went on to die at the Ritz. I want to combine the two. I want to be at the Ritz when someone shot me with the AK-47 that Castro had given to Allende. So far, I am making steady progress towards that death.

In the meantime, 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.