Heart, Head and Constituents

Those who voted with 76 per cent of the population last night included the MP for Gateshead, the MP for Salford and Eccles, the MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington, and three MPs for Leeds, two of them Jewish, including one with two Israeli parents. They were joined by a Jewish former Leader of Leeds City Council. Among the rebels were the 2020 Labour Leadership candidate whose campaign was to have been chaired by Wes Streeting with the support of Peter Kyle, and the Deputy Leadership candidate whom Streeting did in fact nominate, as well as two more of the five candidates in that election.

If the supporters of a ceasefire were largely Muslims, or representative of constituencies with many Muslims in them, or both, then what of it? Was it illegitimate for Margaret Thatcher to change the whole direction of British policy in this area because she was the MP for Finchley? That said, even she managed to expel diplomats when the Israelis had been forging British passports, and to condemn the bombing of the Osirak reactor. Only on those grounds would she be ineligible for membership of Keir Starmer's Labour Party. In any case, the Saracen hordes have hardly taken possession of Bootle, or Sunderland Central, or City of Durham, or Wirral West, or Wansbeck, or South Shields, or Norwich South, or York Central, or Easington, or Jarrow, or Cynon Valley.

Likewise, it is perfectly reasonable for constituents to protest against MPs who had failed to vote for a ceasefire. No one has more right to demonstrate against a war than those who are of an age to fight it, or who soon will be, and a D-Notice confirms that the SAS is already in Gaza, so this is a British war. Those who had previously called for a ceasefire, but who then abstained or even voted the other way, do deserve especial challenge to account for themselves.

It would be just as acceptable to manifest oneself against MPs who had voted in favour of a ceasefire, but no one seems inclined to do that. Such MPs should count themselves lucky, since whereas a million people marched peacefully for an armistice on Armistice Day, a thousand of the other mind rioted at the Cenotaph, injuring nine Police Officers. MPs who failed to vote for a ceasefire, voted instead for that riot by men who were not only tanked up and coked up, but also tooled up, and specifically with bladed articles rather than with firearms, because they were not going to fight Hamas, but to stab the Police, as they duly did. At the Cenotaph. On Armistice Day. As for the Royal Artillery Memorial, here it is, not displaying the names of enemies.

I do not know who told the Stern Gang, or indeed the Azov Battalion, that it owned either that or the Cenotaph, although notice that they and the tendency that is now organised around "Tommy Robinson" are as allied as ever. Given his flagrant breach of his licence on Saturday, then why has Stephen Yaxley-Lennon not been arrested? Given her incitement, then why has Suella Braverman not been arrested? This is the side that Starmer has chosen.

Starmer's side is now peddling dross about rockets under little girls' mattresses in Gaza (what?), and about boxes marked "Medical Supplies" in neither Hebrew nor Arabic, while continuing to produce no evidence whatever of a Hamas base under Al-Shifa Hospital. As I write, it has encircled the same Al-Ahli Arab Hospital that the whole world knows that it bombed from the air, while also moving into the 1700-year-old Armenian Quarter of Jerusalem, in a direct assault on the Christian presence from Gaza to the West Bank, and indeed in the Old City of Jerusalem itself.

In 1990, the same settler organisation temporarily took control of Saint John's Hospice. But now it enjoys the full support of the State. Less than two months after the fall of Artsakh, the first entire people to accept the Gospel faces further catastrophe. Via the Turkey that refuses to turn off the supply, the principal source of gas to Israel is Azerbaijan, which has its eyes on the gas-rich Gaza of which the SAS is preparing to install Tony Blair as Viceroy, in a deal with Benjamin Netanyahu that must have been struck long before the wildly improbable intelligence failure of 7th October.

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.

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.