Hunka Down

I am waiting for information on and from Nagorno-Karabakh, but at least no one in the whole business is going to be called "the new Hitler", since apparently you can now have been a goodie even in the Waffen SS. Whatever the complexities of life in Eastern Europe during the Second World War, there was only one possible reason to join that.

Life was complicated in Western Europe during the War, but would you make excuses for the Dutchmen, Frenchmen and Belgians who joined the Waffen SS? Or for its British Free Corps, originally called the Legion of St George? There were others besides, and in every case the argument was the same, that the real enemy was the Soviet Union. If Yaroslav Hunka was a hero, then so were they. Including Hunka's Galician brothers-in-arms who ended up in Britain, which had been planning a surprise attack on the USSR from no later than 22nd May 1945, and which therefore needed all the Hunkas that it could find.

There is talk of a bid to extradite Hunka to Poland, which has stopped arming Ukraine. We tried to tell you about Ukraine, but of course the Poles have always known. That said, they also want the rest of Galicia back, as Hungary, another member of NATO, wants Transcarpathian Ruthenia. Among a lot of other places. Never question NATO, though. You used to be an anti-Semite if you did that, and now you are a rape apologist. Yet I defy you to name any greater anti-Semitism or rape apologism than even the most partial defence of a man's having voluntarily joined the Waffen SS. That presumably still includes all parties in the British and Canadian Houses of Commons, although Ed Davey's Leader's Speech today pointedly never mentioned Ukraine. Even The Times has reported the lengths to which Ukrainian men were going in order to avoid conscription. UEFA has just let the Russian under-17s back in. Little things are shifting.

And 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.