Baptism of Fire

There was a mistaken report last week, but tonight it really does seem to be the case that the third oldest working church in the world, the Church of Saint Porphyrius in Gaza City, has been bombed, and has been so while it was sheltering more than 500 people, at least 150 of whom are now dead.

Here, the Anglican Archbishop of Jerusalem, Dr Hosam Naoum, flanked by the other Christian leaders there, confirms that the Al-Ahli Arabi Hospital received “specific warnings” by telephone on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday to “evacuate the hospital” prior to being bombed on Tuesday, as it duly was.

Indeed, “at least 15” hospitals have received such warnings, and certainly at least 12 have been bombed. It is of course impossible to evacuate a hospital, and therefore it is of course a war crime to bomb a civilian hospital no matter how much notice has been given.

In the case of the Al-Ahli Arabi Hospital bombing, the line is that since no Palestinian weapon could have killed that many people, then that many people could not have been killed. By pretending to believe that contemptible thing, almost all national British politicians, and the entire official British media, are demeaning themselves, and are insulting their electorate and their audience.

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.