Political Brand

GB News? Jeremy Hunt's mistake the day after the Budget was to go on the BBC news and current affairs programmes or on Channel 4 News, since those have much smaller audiences than, say, George Galloway or Russell Brand.

Brand is now far bigger than the Channel 4 that made him, and which is the State. As of course is the BBC, which tagged along this morning. We remember both of them, and specifically Dispatches and Woman's Hour, in relation to Julian Assange and Jeremy Corbyn. Just as we remember The Times and the Sunday Times. We do not trust any of them as far as we could spit. Whereas Brand has interviewed Stella Assange, The Times still periodically publishes the rape allegations against her husband as fact. Charlotte Wace has form.

Brand should contest a forthcoming by-election. He has not been arrested, and anyway you can stand for Parliament on bail, let me assure you. If you are a British, Irish or Commonwealth citizen, then you can do so from a prison cell, so long as that cell is not in the United Kingdom or the Republic of Ireland. Unless one of Brand's voiced up and anonymous accusers stood against him, then they never existed. But if one of them did, then the verdict of his peers would be which of him and her took more votes.

The only public thing about my school was the presence of the very general public indeed, so I voted for myself, meaning that I was acquitted by 401 more of my peers than convicted me. Those with access to such information, and they do exist, tell me that the jurors in my case, fit and healthy middle-aged persons at the time, are the stuff of legend, with over half of them already dead of rare and aggressive illnesses, or freak road accidents on the other side of the world, or what have you. Certainly, while I have never made an enemy in my life, those who have chosen to make enemies of me comprise a catalogue of lost jobs and lost seats, failed marriages and failed businesses, "early retirements" and early deaths. Who would join them?

But I digress. When Brand was allegedly doing what he is alleged to have done, then he was living exactly the liberal capitalist lifestyle of those who have turned against him because he has turned against them. No doubt they do indeed keep tabs on celebrity types, lest any of them ever go rogue politically, which, while most unlikely, is demonstrably not impossible. Brand remains badly wrong about, especially, drugs, but at least he no longer takes them, unlike some. I have been calling for decades for the age of consent to be raised to 18 with a grace period for teenagers who were close in age, but that is not in fact the law, and if even the present age were enforced, then you would clear media London and its favoured political salons in one raid.

The people wanting Brand banged up for sleeping with a 16-year-old want 16-year-olds to have the vote, and want much younger children to be given puberty blockers and "gender reassignment" surgery even without parental consent. I used to be uncharacteristically agnostic about votes at 16, but this gender identity business is a dealbreaker. Those behind it have already been putting underage girls on the Pill for 40 years, and probably 60. There is only one possible reason to do that. Thank you, Margaret Thatcher, who fought for it all the way through the courts, although it is has still never been put to a parliamentary vote in relation to England, Wales, or arguably Northern Ireland. It is high time to see a Commons Division List on this.

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.