Black Marks

Ali Bongo was the first African leader to call for the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi, from which flows the chaos in the Sahel, and in that cause Barack Obama even gerrymandered a seat for Gabon on the UN Security Council. Good riddance. Now the 2.4 million people of that African Kuwait might be lifted out of their abject poverty.

The most successful white supremacist organisation in history, the one that ran the South until the blacks were able to vote, is trying to smear Cornel West as a deadbeat dad, while refusing to permit debates between Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Strom Thurmond's eulogist, the man who restored the federal death penalty, the father of the prison-industrial complex, the man who opposed bussing because he did not want his children to grow up in a "racial jungle", and the Vice President throughout the Obama Administration's mass deportations, its caging of children, and its wars.

Joe Biden's own Vice President is of course Kamala Harris, who locked up African-American men as if it had been going out of fashion, and who kept them locked up as cheap labour for her corporate donors. The Democratic Party would have no shortage of such donors during a second Trump Administration, and that is why it wants one so badly.

As to the British Emmett Till de nos jours, you need a visa for Spain these days, so if Mason Greenwood secured one to enable him to be loaned to Getafe, then that recording would be provenly false. Not for the first time, since if it had been genuine, then the Crown Prosecution Service would have proceeded with what would therefore have been an open-and-shut case against him. Manchester United's enormous African fanbase should loan its affections until justice were done.

The Grand Dragon, Racist Riley, cannot define a woman, and she is simply nowhere near as famous as Greenwood either in this country or internationally. That was also true of her and Jeremy Corbyn, but this is of a different order. Corbyn should now sue Jake Wallis Simons in person for having repeated the "English irony" libel in his latest book, which is so bad that it claims that racist Police violence provoked no questioning of the foundations of the British, French or American polity. Whom does he read? Obviously, he does not read. At all.

As the case of Greenwood illustrates, fear of the black male of African descent is indeed fundamental to the capitalist system that was founded on the transatlantic slave trade, and Greenwood has confirmed its very worst terror by impregnating a white woman. The slave trade financed enclosure. There has always been One Struggle. It genuinely discombobulates someone like Antoinette Sandbach, a former Liberal Democrat as well as Conservative MP and still a Lib Dem member, to learn that this country had any role in the slave trade except to end it, but in fact our engagement in it lasted longer than the period since abolition has yet managed.

Yet reparations to whom and from whom? To the likes of Bongo, and at the time of writing there remain plenty of them in power, from the descendants of the Peasants' Revolt, the Levellers, and those who were massacred at Peterloo? Certainly not. The slave trade financed enclosure. There has always been One Struggle. Moreover, large and growing numbers of us are descended both from these Islands' immemorial working class and from African slaves, with a few of us coming off Indian indentured labourers and Chinese coolies as well.

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 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.