Domestic Violence and Safeguarding, Indeed

No one has been appointed to Jess Phillips's only ever portfolio, Shadowing a Minister who did not exist. Keir Starmer clearly took the same view of her indispensability as Jeremy Corbyn did. But she is trying to worm her way back in, expressing the ruling class's profound terror of political activity by the common people.

Phillips had a lot to say about Julian Assange, who would be eligible to contest Starmer's seat and who ought to do so, and she had a lot to say about Russell Brand, who, 10 weeks on, may or may not face a civil suit in New York, and that, if that, is it. He has not been arrested. No attempt is being made to extradite him to California. For 20 years, the law on sexual offences has been the Sexual Offences Act 2003, which is the crowning glory of Harriet Harman, the preeminent British feminist politician of the Baby Boom. Any complaint about its operation should be addressed to her, while Brand should contest Gosport against Caroline Dinenage.

Speaking of rapes, six weeks on, and we all know there were none when Hamas attacked Israel, as there were not 40 decapitated babies (in stark contrast to the scores of dead babies that there are in Gaza), as there was no baby in an oven, and as the IDF falsely attributed to Hamas things that it itself had done 41 years ago, when pregnant women really were cut open to cut up their babies at Sabra and Shatila.

The people peddling this dross purveyed the falsehood of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, among numerous others before and since, and 90 per cent of people saw through that at the time, never mind 20 years later. The official estimate of the number of Israeli dead, which was never particularly high when seen from most of the world, has already been revised down, with every expectation that it will be again. Rather a lot of them have turned out to have been military personnel. As have quite a few of the hostages. Who knew?

Most of the world has laughed out the idea that this or that Palestinian faction had bombed Al-Ahli Arab Hospital, along with talk of Arabic translations of Mein Kampf in children's bedrooms, rockets under little girls' beds, a Hamas base under Al-Shifa Hospital, and Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad waving the flag of their sworn enemy, and Israel's ally, ISIS. Israel backed ISIS so forcefully against Bashar al-Assad that Priti Patel's first Cabinet resignation was because she had tried to divert British aid money to an ISIS field hospital in the Golan Heights. Hamas's nipping of any ISIS sympathies in the bud in Gaza has been decidedly more robust than any such action in Britain.

Every hospital in Gaza has now been bombed, along with numerous schools, ambulance convoys, refugee camps, churches, and so on. So the same is being done on the West Bank, with a particular focus, as in Gaza, on the eradication of the Christian presence, there being no cause dearer to the hearts of Benjamin Netanyahu's coalition partners. The Armenian Quarter may be falling as I write. Where is the outrage at the destruction of Christianity in the Holy Land in general, and in Jerusalem in particular? We are already at 76 per cent public support. In the runup to Christmas, imagine if people knew this. Then again, perhaps they do? When only "Tommy Robinson" wants to attend your march, then maybe it's you?

For, speaking of Christmas, hope springs eternal. It is now permissible to mention that Israel in general and Netanyahu in particular cultivated Hamas to divide Gaza from the West Bank and treat Gaza as an enemy entity. People are beginning to question the likelihood of the intelligence failure on 7th October, as was questioned here that very day. There is the matter of Gaza's gas, and of the fact that the SAS is already there with a view to installing Tony Blair as Viceroy. There is the memory, just about still living, of what the founders of Israel did to Britain and the British, including during the Second World War. There is the fact that, even before beginning to explore the diversity of opinion among them, Jews are only half of one per cent of the British population, with no right to any more or less clout than, say, the Arab half of one per cent, or the half of one per cent that professed a gender identity different from its biological sex. There was the clearly planned riot against the Police at the Cenotaph on Armistice Day. And so on.

When he was days into being Prime Minister, then David Cameron called the Gaza flotilla raid "unacceptable". As with William Hague's 2006 description of the bombardment of Lebanon as "disproportionate", or Cameron's 2010 description of Gaza as "a prison camp", or his 2016 description of the West Bank settlements as "illegal", or Rishi Sunak's speech to the Lord Mayor's Banquet on Monday, anyone who said anything like that would be expelled from the Labour Party. Oh, yes, hope springs eternal.

Not least, 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.