Relief and Works?

The International Court of Justice's ruling cannot be implemented without a ceasefire, and the finding of a case to answer in the matter of genocide means that any politician supporting Israel in Gaza, including by permitting arms sales on the part of very big donors, is potentially open to a charge of complicity. Complicity in genocide.

So here comes the backlash, namely a mere allegation that 0.04 per cent of the staff of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency might have been, oh, something or other. Compared to what has happened since, there is something vulgar about mentioning 7th October. Considerably more people than died in that attack die each year in British road traffic accidents, also as a foreseeable outworking of policy, while a large number of the dead of 7th October have been found by the Israeli media, which are vastly better than ours, to have been victims of the Hannibal Directive.

Yet, having barely mentioned the ICJ ruling, our own Hard Right liberal media, half of which pretends not to be one of those while the other half pretends not to be the other, parrot this obviously false story as obediently as they parroted the obviously false 40 beheaded babies, or the obviously false weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Already, as few people will admit to ever having pretended to believe the former as will admit to ever having pretended to believe the latter. Very soon, the same will apply to UNRWA and Hamas. That has about it the whiff of "Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda", at war with each other at the time.

By contrast, the Houthis have still never even inflicted an injury, much less have they killed anyone, in the course of their blockade of supplies to what the ICJ has found to be a plausible case of genocide, not even now that they have attacked a Singaporean company's oil tanker that was flying the flag of the Marshall Islands. How deterred they are by fatal British and American airstrikes, although Singapore became independent of the United Kingdom in 1963, while the Marshall Islands became nominally independent of the United States in 1986.

Nominally, because those island states with American bases and not much else are really only allowed to pretend to be independent so that they will vote with Israel at the United Nations. If American nuclear weapons are indeed coming to RAF Lakenheath, then, even more than was already the case, Britain is clearly being lined up to become such an island state, allowed the trappings of sovereignty on condition of being a reliable UN vote for the axis that ran through Washington and Tel Aviv. Washington has decided that we had been developing delusions of the real thing, and we will not have helped matters by waiting far longer than Italy, Canada or Australia to jump to attention and cut funding to the agency that was relieving the worst famine in the world, found by the ICJ to be open to the charge of genocide. Still, we have done it now, thereby directly breaching the ICJ's ruling that more should be done to aid Gaza. We have done so with the enthusiastic support of an Official Opposition that would not have delayed, and whose candidate for Foreign Secretary was the only person in the world to allege that babies had been raped on 7th October.

In the immediate term, George Galloway has announced his candidacy at Rochdale. Beyond that, 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.