Hostage Situation

If the ceasefire were lifted, as Keir Starmer has always advocated and as was demanded by Sunday's mercifully few marchers, a very high proportion of whom were downmarket media personalities such as Rachel Riley and Boris Johnson, then that would be only because Benjamin Netanyahu was being held hostage by coalition partners who, unlike Hamas, did not allow women to be candidates for public office, and who acted on their sense of religious obligation to burn down churches, again not something for which Hamas went in.

ISIS, which Israel supported in Syria as enthusiastically as Britain and the United States did but with far more practical assistance, is like al-Qaeda in despising Hamas, which fulsomely returns the compliment. Hamas is allied to Iran, it participates in elections, and it has not implemented Sharia in Gaza in anything like a form acceptable to those factions, if at all. There, it has stamped them out without mercy.

To ISIS or al-Qaeda, it is absolutely forbidden to fight alongside Hamas on those grounds, and it would be even if none of them applied, since Hamas, while it vaguely aspires to a global caliphate as in some sense any Sunni Muslim does, is fundamentally and ultimately a nationalist movement, really only actively seeking an Islamic State in Palestine, and then only its own understanding of one, the character of which may already be seen in Gaza. ISIS cannot, however, hold it against Hamas that it has been funded by Israel, although it is now permissible to point out that it has been.

While David Cameron and Andrew Mitchell understand this, so that no member of the Government attended the march to resume the genocide by people who could not get cast in panto this season, Labour does not have a clue, so that that event was addressed by a member of the Shadow Cabinet. In the way that this whole issue divides the politically from the performatively working-class, so it also divides proper toffs from jumped up oiks.

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 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.