Pause For Thought

On Wednesday, the United Nations Security Council voted for whatever "humanitarian pauses" were, with even Benjamin Netanyahu's little helper abstaining, and with his little helper's little helper therefore also doing so. When are those pauses going to start?

Publicising how MPs voted on a ceasefire in Gaza would be problematic only if their having done so were shameful, and even that would arguably make it the opposite of a problem, but instead a positive duty and a public service. Where is the fearless free press? 60 journalists have already been killed in Gaza, which cannot be an accident.

Are Liam Byrne and Conor McGinn figures of the Islamo-Marxist Blah Blah Blah? Is McGinn under the Moorish electoral yoke at St Helens North? At Holborn and St Pancras, although I have made the contact to try and put the perfectly eligible Julian Assange on the ballot paper, nothing seems to have come of it, and the redoubtable Organise Corbyn Inspired Socialist Alliance (OCISA) has begun the process of selecting an Independent candidate, with "a built-in bias towards residents in the constituency". The smart money will be on Andrew Feinstein.

A vastly more experienced politician than Keir Starmer, Feinstein is a son of Holocaust survivors, and he has already served seven years as an MP in South Africa. Jews are half of one per cent of the British population, and only one in five of them, 0.1 per cent of the population, has voted Labour at any of the last four General Elections. That figure was the same before Jeremy Corbyn, including when the Labour Leader was Jewish, as it was under him, and as it will be after him. Moreover, a good half even of that tiny Jewish Labour vote is very left-wing indeed, marked by a particularly pronounced solidarity with the Palestinians, and exceptionally loyal to Corbyn. For example, Feinstein.

It says it all about the Labour Party that Feinstein could not now be a parliamentary candidate for it. 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.