Tearing A Strip

If politics and the media were remotely representative, then yesterday's demonstrations would have been on the other side. The one in London was addressed by the most popular politician in the country; he has dropped below 30 per cent, yet everyone else is still below him. But he has become an official unperson, even though he and his longest-standing parliamentary ally, an unparalleled object of ritual abuse, are certainly going to keep their seats as Independents.

Other septuagenarians, having spent decades advocating abstention while running away from the candidacy that they could perfectly well have afforded, are now urging a vote for Rishi Sunak rather than have their columns reallocated to, say, the 34-year-old Seb Payne, or the 27-year-old Tom Harwood, future Ministers both. But I digress.

On Israel and Palestine, there are, in drastically reduced order of size from each to the next, four broad schools of thought in Britain: the indifferent, the profoundly ambivalent, the strongly pro-Palestinian, and the fiercely Zionist. Yet almost all politicians, and the entire media, belong to that tiny fourth faction, which barely featured in British public life until there was a Prime Minister whose constituency happened to have a wildly untypical ethnic profile, but which did not become anything like dominant even under her.

That dominance arose in a window of perhaps half a generation, between the retirements of the British Mandate veterans (although a few of those are still alive, such as my late father's old Army comrade who went on to by my Senior Tutor when I was an undergraduate), and the emergence of the mass anti-war movement in relation to Afghanistan and, especially, Iraq. To this day, Israel is not a British ally. In what specific way is it? It simply is not. Yet we are expected to make Israel's, often undeniably unpleasant, enemies our own.

Israel armed Argentina during the Falklands War as an act of anti-British revenge on the part of Menachem Begin. My friend Hernán Dobry is the author of a groundbreaking book, Operation Israel: The Rearming of Argentina During the Dictatorship, 1976-1983. He owns all of the rights, because his publisher in Argentina has decided against a second edition. But he has updated it based on new research. Both the Spanish text and an English translation need to be published both in Argentina and in Britain. Hernán maintains that his English is not up to translating his text, and my Spanish is certainly nowhere near that good, so we do need to find someone. A major London publishing house is interested, but the question is that of the translation costs, which would be in the region of £5000. We have a translator already lined up. We just need to able to pay her. Anyone in a position to help in any way, please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com.

Even beyond that, what have the Israelis ever done for us? What would they? Why should they? They have everything that they could possibly need to defend themselves. We are irrelevant to them. Yet our politics revolve around them. Their Ambassador to London accompanies our Foreign Secretary when he visits her country. No one else, absolutely no one, gets that kind of treatment. And if it were to cause bombs to go off in Britain, well, somehow that would prove that it had been right all along. "Not just today, not just tomorrow, but always"? That is not the stuff of grownup relations with any foreign state. None, including that one, would say such a thing about Britain. Nor should it.

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 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.