Come To Light

At Rochdale, the nominees of two national parties are now literally paper candidates, in much the same position as if they had died since Close of Nominations. When else have we ever seen anything like this?

"It's very uncharacteristic in my experience of [Azhar Ali] to be parroting a conspiracy theory," John McTernan told TalkTV just after four o'clock this afternoon. Ali is that much of a Blairite insider, a former Blair and Brown adviser who sits for a ward 25 miles from Rochdale, on a council that does not cover the town. By-election candidates are picked centrally. I have no idea why people are mentioning Jeremy Corbyn at all.

Far too late to make any difference, the Equality and Human Rights Commission found all of two cases of anti-Semitism in Corbyn's Labour Party, and it declined to defend even those at judicial review. The whole scam was barely even about foreign policy. It was about silencing the Left as a voice in the debate on economic policy. No one has ever accused Ali of being part of that, so the scammers have stuck with him until recent hours. The trick was never supposed to be used against people like him. Well, it is now. 

They defended him all day, yet look at them tonight. What a complete and utter shambles. Keir Starmer has been in politics five minutes, and it shows. The winner at Rochdale is going to be George Galloway, of course. Say what you like about him, but he is a professional operator. And even in the United States, there is not the popular support for this war that there would once have been. There is none whatever anywhere else, including in Britain, where there never would have been any. Ever. For good or ill, there are British allies in the Middle East. But Israel is not one of them. What form does that alliance take? Including many critics and outright opponents of Israel, Jews are half of one per cent of the British population. The same as Arabs, among whom in the world, though never in Britain, supporters of Israel are occasionally brought out as the rarest of curiosities. You would never guess those numbers from our media or from our politics.

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.