Intent On Confrontation

Poor old Michael Gove. Two years ago, he accidentally walked into the anti-lockdown lot. And now, this. Someone should keep him more abreast of what was going on. Yet it is always Gove. Always with a television camera in attendance. And him a professional journalist. What are the odds? 

Actual Nazis rioted at the Cenotaph this Armistice Day. But then there was a 99-year-old woman on Blankety Blank, and all was well again. Except, of course, that it was not, and it is not. Not even when you factor in that, since all nine of the injured Police Officers had been assaulted by the rioting Nazis rather than by Rishi Sunak's nebulous "Hamas sympathisers", the crackdown on the Far Right is going to be one for the ages, and may already have started by now.

With or without any interest in the Middle East, everyone in Britain has effectively picked a side. If you are not with the family carnival for peace, hundreds of thousands strong and probably a million, then you are with the handful of drunken, coked up, tooled up rioters who injured nine Police Officers at the Cenotaph on Armistice Day.

Later this morning, Suella Braverman will herself be at the Cenotaph, where she ought to be arrested for incitement. But she is not the only one. Keir Starmer said that this march should not have gone ahead, thereby delegitimising it, and thus giving aid and succour to the "counter-protesters", as he had previously done to the cutting off of water, food and electricity to the one million children of Gaza, and to the dropping of white phosphorus on them.

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.