Not Happening In A Vacuum

There are a lot of wars in the world. The most common foreign nationality in the United Kingdom is Indian, including the Prime Minister's wife, and there are at least seven wars going on entirely in India, plus the ongoing unrest in Punjab, and plus the dispute over Kashmir, which also involves another country to which more than 1.5 million people in Britain have close connections. Yet as with the constitutional crisis in Pakistan, which even features a celebrity recognisable in Britain, when do you ever hear about any of this?

In this country, the number of either Punjabis or Kashmiris alone dwarfs the number of Jews and Arabs put together, populations that are the same size as each other, with each of them the same size as the number that professes to have a gender identity different from its biological sex. Yet two of those three halves of one per cent have vast cultural and political influence, while unless you counted a few billionaire princelings who lived in London intermittently, the other has practically none. Add to that the fact that a large minority of British Jews does not agree with what is being done, and will be done, to Gaza.

Anyone who chose immigration and "multiculturalism" as their ground in 2023 had better not have had few, if any, ancestors in these Islands in 1873, and almost certainly none in 1823. Not our choice of ground, brothers and sisters. Not our choice of ground. I have been telling you for years about the free speech Johnny-come-latelies who had been all in favour of cancel culture when they had been the ones doing the cancelling. They have not changed a bit. What colour is a snowflake? 

Claims of rape are now made only by gameshow glamourous assistants and the like, who also trot out the rubbish about the cutting open of pregnant women to cut up their babies. They do not object to abortion, but in any case, that was what really happened at Sabra and Shatila in 1982. The IDF is now falsely attributing to Hamas this month things that it itself did in actual fact 41 years ago. Since no one expects Rachel Riley to know that, then she ought to be kept in her proper place.

The "40 beheaded babies" story, and again those peddling it thought that Carla Foster ought not to have been prosecuted even though her daughter had drawn breath, has been downgraded to "an unspecified number of dead people, some of whom were babies, and some of whom had ended up headless". Even that comes only from the Israeli Government, but there is no reason to disbelieve it, thus phrased. Yet that precise and Biblical number of deliberately decapitated infants has been fundamental to this war, like Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that were capable of deployment within 45 minutes.

The truth of Hamas's attack would have been bad enough to have elicited a strong response. But not the response on which Benjamin Netanyahu was hellbent. Netanyahu did not get lucky. The bests spies in the world did not all miss this. And now, he has co-opted his opponents, he has marginalised and neutralised his rivals on the Right, he has silenced the judges, and he has usefully exposed the Western elites as cheerleaders for collective punishment and for genocide. At last, he will rank with his brother. A lot of the most effective politicians are psychopaths. They would get far less done if they were not.

Hacks who are now claiming to have watched the events of 7th October have in reality watched them only in the sense that a few hours ago, I watched Coronation Street. It is a particular sort of journalist that is invited to view matter that the common people may not. It is a particular sort of reader, viewer or listener that then takes such a journalist's word for it.

Israel has squandered any sympathy that the original attack may have gained it, as those of us who had been reared on the memory of the Mandate knew that it would. Support for it turns out to have a popular following only in the United States, and even there the other side now also has one, which is far younger, far more active, and far better-educated. Such support is also a self-conscious mark of real or imagined elite status there and in a handful of other countries, including Britain. But in most of the world, it simply does not exist. Where it does, then loyalty is tested by the willingness to degrade oneself by uttering the official Israeli account of the bombing of the Al-Ahli Arabi Hospital, and by not mentioning the attack on the Church of Saint Porphyrius, which by the way killed several of Justin Amash's relatives. Thus tested, our dear Prime Minister and our dear Leader of the Opposition both pass with flying colours.

Do you ordinarily identify with Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer, with Joe Biden and Justin Trudeau, with Emmanuel Macron and Ursula von der Leyen? Well, there you are, then. Rather, the black and white keffiyeh was created by a British Lieutenant-General who was already a Companion of the Order of Saint Michael and Saint George, and who was subsequently also made a Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath. He had commanded one of the last great victories of an Imperial client princely state's British-led Army, namely the British-funded Arab Legion's securement of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, in 1948. That securement was recognised immediately by Britain, and for that matter by the United States. Think on.

Like Biden's but even more so, Starmer's back-peddling manages to be comical even under the circumstances. He aided and abetted the cutting off of food, water and electricity to one million children in Gaza, and the dropping of white phosphorus on them. Those were and are war crimes, making him a war criminal. Having always refused to attend the Durham Miners' Gala, he would be only four miles from it, and yet so far from it, in HMP Frankland with Levi Bellfield, Wayne Couzens, Ian Huntley, Thomas Mair and Charles Taylor, all of whom would no doubt be delighted to give a richly deserved welcome to that former Director of Public Prosecutions, along with David Lammy and, in accordance with their stated principles, Emily Thornberry and Lisa Nandy. Apart from the sex thing, why should that not happen? Thornberry and Nandy could be sent to Low Newton, which is only next door, and where they could enjoy the company of Lucy Letby.

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 Sunak became Prime Minister, I predicted that a General Election between him and 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.