Determining Blame

The New York Times. Practically their own family says that the Israelis knew a year ago. An intelligence failure on this scale would have been impossible. Simply impossible. As you read here on 7th October. Eight weeks on, and it is all falling apart.

Benjamin Netanyahu needed to be got out of a tight spot, and his coalition partners, to whom he had given responsibility for security despite their routine attacks on the IDF in the West Bank, wanted to clear Gaza before moving on to their own immediate vicinity. So the guard was deliberately let down, and here we are.

If you abstained on a ceasefire, then you voted for this. If you marched on Sunday, then you marched for this. If you addressed that thankfully small but deliciously vulgar affair, then you addressed this. And if you did so as a member of the Shadow Cabinet, since to its credit no member of the Government turned up, then you did so with the permission and approval of Keir Starmer.

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.