Dramatic Developments

Why should it not be a drama that forced such change? Why should it not be an ITV drama? There should be one on the jaw-dropping Single Justice Procedure, and another on the plight of those who were still serving the abolished sentence of imprisonment for public protection.

Then there is the basis of Prevent in a proven hoax that continued to ruin some people's lives. I am the only convicted international terrorist ever to have scored 100 per cent on a Prevent qualification. I have certificates, for which I had to identify the only accurate or reliable sources of information from a set list as being the BBC and an advertisement for toothpaste. The State cannot be wrong, the corporations cannot be wrong, and there is no meaningful distinction between the two, to the point of branding everyone else a liar, a form of violence that is likely to incite worse forms against divergence from this merger of state and corporate power. There is a word for that.

On that note, the really big one would be blacklisting and spycops, but its sheer size would be the problem. It would take up a lot of television hours and its effectiveness would be precisely its bringing down of a lot of people. Still, where there's a will, ITV. What does the I stand for? For that matter, what does the S in STV stand for, since the Scottish victims are being denied access to the public inquiry by the British Government, while the Scottish Government refuses to hold one?

That same Scottish Government will not enact the blanket exoneration and compensation that is to be enacted at Westminster as a result of the Post Office scandal. That legislation needs to cover the United Kingdom as a whole, and challenge the SNP to vote against it. Those were all public prosecutions in Scotland, brought in the name of a Lord Advocate who was a party politician, during this period first Labour and then SNP. Scottish Conservatives have a rural vote to shore up, and the Liberal Democrats are already in trouble over this story.

As is Labour, led as it is by a man who as Director of Public Prosecutions supposedly never noticed that subpostmasters were suddenly being prosecuted for dishonesty at a rate of one in seven, and never took over any of those private prosecutions to shut it down, but did take over several of them in order to pursue them to conviction, in one case sending a pregnant woman to prison with Rose West.

The concentration on Keir Starmer's previous clients at the Bar is low, but it is Starmer's own fault. He goes on about his past as DPP, although he claims that it was purely a titular office whenever anything questionable comes up. And he was a cab rank defender before that. Someone has to be. But, like former Directors of Public Prosecutions, they do not normally try to become Prime Minister. "That's not fair" or "clause this, subclause that" does not cut it in politics. Proscription of Hizb ut-Tahrir, which much harder Home Secretaries had always ruled out, has only two purposes, to identify the overwhelming public opposition to the war in Gaza with it, but mostly to identity Starmer with it. We in the anti-war movement know how to suck it up and spit it back. Used to his own way, Starmer does not. Such fun.

Labour has no policy of abolishing the Single Justice Procedure, and it introduced both IPP sentences and Prevent. Horizon was introduced at the insistence of Peter Mandelson, while that Government refused to hold an inquiry into spycops, as it did not hold one into Hillsborough, and as Labour once again would not hold one into Orgreave.

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.