Stock Exchange

It has been 20 years since the farcical Manchester United bomb-plot-that-wasn't, and 21 since troops and tanks were sent to strut around Heathrow Airport, but some of us were amused to be reminded of such past hilarities when we heard of the arrests of those who had allegedly threatened to "disrupt the London Stock Exchange".

Neither Liz Truss nor Kwasi Kwarteng had been apprehended, but that would have been too little, too late. If the intended disruption had been in the style of Just Stop Oil, then notice what such tactics were routinely permitted to disrupt with impunity, although, for good or ill, no such stunt could disturb the Stock Exchange.

But we had all been expecting one of these false flags. Saturday's march for a ceasefire in Gaza was a million strong, and it was not the first to have been that large, while even the organisers put the turnout at Sunday's Israeli Embassy event at only 25,000. Has anyone demanded that they pay the cost of policing out of their own pockets?

Successive pro-ceasefire events have been entirely peaceful, whereas the first official pro-genocide one had to remove "Tommy Robinson" because he had correctly assumed that he was its target audience, having already staged an officially unofficial riot in the same interest at the Cenotaph on Armistice Day, during which numerous Police Officers had been stabbed with weapons that had been brought for the purpose.

The Police, though, have their orders. They are to provoke trouble by such means as kettling, and since even that has failed, they are also to stage this sort of thing. The side that is supported by the overwhelming majority of the population has to be presented as the problem. In similar vein, the proscription of the peripheral Hizb ut-Tahrir is intended to associate the call for peace with it, just as all the old nonsense about the global terrorist network and the Axis of Evil has been revived to describe supposedly connected organisations and states that in reality went around killing each other, or would do so if they had ever heard of each other. Based on the last time, do not be surprised if some of those organisations turned out not to exist at all.

The Houthis survived a decade of bombardment by Saudi Arabia and its little helpers, aided and abetted by Britain and the United States, and they remain in an existential war with the IS and al-Qaeda that the Wahhabi created. That is the IS that, while Hamas was mercilessly suppressing any sympathy for it in Gaza, Israel was providing with, among other things, the Golan Heights field hospital for which it sought British public funding through Priti Patel.

In the midst of this indignity, Rishi Sunak plumbs new depths by suggesting that the Houthis' blockade of Red Sea shipping, which unlike our bombing of Yemen has killed no one, had nothing to do with the situation in Gaza, echoing the suggestion that the 7/7 bombings had had nothing to do with the Iraq War. The bombers had made quite clear that it had, as the Houthis are perfectly frank today, having no more attacked the Royal Navy than Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. The Official Opposition cheered on the lies then, and the favour is being returned now.

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 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.