Idol Talk Costs Lives

The Holy Family Church in Gaza City was bombed during Mass on this All Saints Day. That's a hat-trick, since Catholics, Orthodox and Protestants have all now been bombed.

Last night, it was the Greek Orthodox Cultural Centre, as it had already been the extremely ancient Church of Saint Porphyrius. Almost all Greek Orthodox of the Jerusalem Patriarchate are Palestinian.

And the whole world knows who bombed the Anglican-Baptist Al-Ahli Arabi Hospital, including its chapel, with a handful of people in a handful of countries pretending to believe something else, thereby placing themselves in the same category as those who affected to imagine that Dr David Kelly had committed suicide. Indeed, those are very often the same faux fantasists.

How was hitting any of those unmistakable targets a strike against Hamas? But in addition to including two parties that differed from Hamas in forbidding women to be candidates for public office, the Israeli Government includes people who, like that Government's ISIS allies in Syria but demonstrably unlike Hamas, actively believe that there is a religious obligation to destroy churches, even the most sparsely Protestant (or, indeed, Modern Catholic) ones, since the assertion of the Divinity of Christ is itself idolatrous.

In Britain, that Government enjoys such cross-party support that MPs on both sides of the House are purged for deviating from its line, while the rest of us face criminalisation if we expressed the opinion of three quarters of us, including the Editorial Board of the Financial Times, in favour of a ceasefire, or if we endorsed the constitutional position of Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud party, forcefully articulated by Tzipi Hotovely, that there should be one state from the River to the Sea. In any case, Andy McDonald never said that second part.

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 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.