Power Through Protest

Wes Streeting's majority was all of 5,198 last time. As recently as 2015, it was only 589. From 2005 to 2015, Ilford North was a Conservative seat. The boundary changes have made it even more Muslim than it already was, and Streeting is the greatest threat to the National Health Service in England since its foundation, with the Labour frontbench taking 25 per cent more money from the health privateers than the Conservatives have done, an eye-watering £650,000.

Leanne Mohamad's Independent candidacy therefore deserves every support, and one hopes that she will concentrate as heavily on stopping the genocidal privatisation of the NHS as on stopping the genocide in Gaza and increasingly also elsewhere. In 1993, the former Bolivian President, García Meza Tejada, was convicted of genocide for the deaths of fully eight people. Those may or may not have been the only people whom he killed. But they were legally the only victims of his genocide. The number of deaths in Gaza has already been somewhat in excess of eight, as has the number of deaths from the privatisation that the English NHS has endured in preparation for the full fire sale. Everywhere else in the United Kingdom, even prescription charges are dismissed as a moral atrocity by everyone, and as a threat to the Union by those who would wish to preserve it. Quite.

Under Labour, Britain would be the only country in the world, including the United States, that refused to support even the principle of a Palestinian State unless the Israelis agreed to it, which means never. The world looks at Gaza and sees white men killing brown women and children, and singing and dancing about it. Tottenham certainly looks at Gaza and knows whose skin tone its own norm more closely resembles. Hey hey, ho ho, David Lammy has got to go.

This afternoon, Lammy literally ran away and hid. Yet he wants to be, of all things, Foreign Secretary. Of course, he has form as a laughable figure, calling Brexit voters "Nazis", and women who recognised biological sex "dinosaurs". Blue Labour used to publish him, and wanted him to be Mayor of London. I mean, why?

This country's infinitesimal Israel Lobby is lashing out at the realisation that, while they were both fairly small in Britain, the other side was vastly larger, and on the specific present issue commanded overwhelming public support. Our politics and media are a de facto monopoly on the part of those who truly believe that 76 per cent of people, although the figure is probably even higher now, are Hamas supporters, or at the very least that there are a million such, since pro-ceasefire marches have repeatedly attracted that number while their own manage a mere 25,000 even on the organisers' estimates.

It could never happen in anything like the American mainstream, so the newfound attention to Palestinian Christianity, even allowing it to speak for itself, is driving the 25,000, about 0.04 per cent of the population, completely round the bend. Likewise, the equation of Evangelical Protestantism with Zionism will fail to survive the looming confrontation with African, Caribbean, and increasingly also Asian and Latin American reality, including in Britain. Those are ideal sources for a candidate against Lammy, a candidate who would also be unlikely to agree with him on the definition of a woman.

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.