Consider The Lilies

While pre-existing conservative phenomena have been known to ally with Fascism, usually to their own ruin, it is the liberal bourgeoisie that keeps Fascism in reserve for when it might ever face any serious demand to share its economic or social power with anyone who did not have it before the rise of the bourgeois liberal order, or to share its cultural or political power with anyone at all. We are cockroaches.

Like Juan Guaidó, Alexei Navalny was a textbook example of the type. But he was neither famous nor important in Russia, just as Guaidó is neither famous nor important in Venezuela. The only two credible explanations for Navalny's demise are murder and one of those middle-aged sudden deaths. The latter is far more plausible. Not least, although not only, because the conditions in FKU IK-3 would have been more than averagely likely to have brought it on.

Even if Navalny had been murdered, then it would have been on the orders of someone fairly lowly. There was no reason for Vladimir Putin to concern himself with so minor a figure. The Western media's disappointment that the revolution has not started should be laughed at in the West, and will be ignored in Russia. "At least 212 people have been detained," apparently. One in 676,415.

We shall never know what happened to Navalny. But then, the files on the death of Dr David Kelly have been sealed for 75 years, so we shall never know about that, either. In reality, of course, we all know perfectly well about Dr Kelly. It is about Navalny that we are truly never going to have anything beyond our speculations.

There are still those who purvey the absurdity that Navalny was poisoned with Novichok on the orders of Putin, who then had a Russian state hospital save his life before allowing him to flee to Germany. Novichok has killed, at most, one person ever, and that would have been an accident. When is there going to be a Coroner's Inquest into Dawn Sturgess? We are expected to accept that everyone involved in these plots either cannot afford a gun, or does not know where to find one, or does not know how to use it. Those who believe these hallucinations walk among us. Those who knowingly spread these falsehoods rule over us and purportedly hold our rulers to account.

On that note, though, since dissidents as such are not supposed to be banged up, while lawfare is not supposed to be used against political opponents as such, then Britain should release Julian Assange, while the many tentacles of the Democratic Party should lay off Donald Trump in the courts of law rather than in the court of electoral opinion.

And since the state that is holding anyone who dies in custody is indeed responsible and must be made to answer, let us hear about Gonzalo Lira, about Jeffrey Epstein, about the deaths of Palestinians in Israeli prisons, and about deaths in custody in the United Kingdom. The story goes that I myself had a hit put on me in prison, but that the hitman took such a liking to me that he gave back the money to those who had sent me there for that purpose and who are trying to do so again.

Certainly, 20 or so years ago, I had hands around my throat at the botched culmination of a plot hatched in the office of the then Government Chief Whip. That is both why nothing about Kim McGuinness surprises me in the least, and why, although I would have been supporting Jamie Driscoll anyway, I am quite so invested in his victory over McGuinness. That, and Jamie's Total Transport Network, which is desperately needed by those of us who are disabled.

Just as the deeply corrupt right-wing Labour machine is even more corrupt in its historic fiefdom of the North East of England than it is elsewhere, so the deeply racist right-wing Labour machine is even more racist in its historic fiefdom of the North East of England than it is elsewhere. Its hereditary personification would not countenance a mixed-race councillor in her constituency, and struggled to comprehend the biological possibility of a mixed-race person, so when, in 2003, a District Councillor for this ward retired, then the Branch Labour Party that I chaired did not even hold a selection meeting. The first that I heard that Lily White of the MP's staff, a recently co-opted Parish Councillor with no school governorships or anything like that, had been nominated, was when I saw the paperwork in the pub.

The excellent Labour Leadership on the old Derwentside District Council had simply assumed that it would be getting me, and had a portfolio lined up. Straddling two constituencies, that Labour council had a de facto policy of putting down the telephone on the staff of that MP, a Labour Cabinet Minister. No one would have spoken to such a person if she had been elected to that authority. But she was not. Labour lost not only that seat, but also that of a senior councillor in this ward. With the party's backing in those days, I would have won. Prove me wrong. A couple of years later, or thereabouts, there were hands around my throat. A dozen years after that, or thereabouts, I was in prison and I quite possibly had a contract out on me.

Lily spent years trying to post pseudonymous comments on here, a few of which I let through, often calling me a "Mulatto". That continued during her time as a senior Labour Party official first regionally and then nationally. In recent days, she seems to have been trying to post anonymously. There has been no racial abuse yet. But if it is her again, then there will be. The Forde Report found that Lily had used the Angry Black Woman trope against Diane Abbott. Assuming that Abbott does not have the Labour whip by the time of the General Election, then Lily, a former London Regional Director of the Labour Party, will be that party's candidate against her, or Lily is a coward.

If the Forde Report had been published on time, then I would have pleaded not guilty to harassment, and I would have been acquitted even by a Bench of Magistrates, if the Crown Prosecution Service had been stupid enough to have brought the case at all. Lily's catalogue of lies, introduced out of the blue at the sentencing hearing so that I could not answer it, would never have been read into the record of a Crown Court. Now that it has been, if Lily came after me again, then I would plead not guilty and force a trial, thereby bringing out everything about her and her former colleagues in open court. After that, the judge could hang me for all that I would care. My duty would be done.

As an aside, despite Lily's inability to be elected to a District Council, and despite her very close call when it came to her Parish seat in 2007, there was talk of her as the MP when her patroness retired over dodgy expenses claims in 2010, becoming Lady Crook. Yes, really. That year, Owen Temple would have beaten either of them, although, while sadly I was too ill to stand, Lily had been endorsed against me by the Ku Klux Klan. Again, yes, really. But even if Lily had won, then what would she have been for her nine years as an MP? A Blairite ultra who pretended to have turned down a frontbench position under Ed Miliband and who then issued pompous refusals of positions that Jeremy Corbyn had never had any intention of offering her. Thank goodness for the all-women shortlist that made clear what her party thought of her in the days when these things were still defined the old-fashioned way. If anyone else was as close as I was both to Blue Labour and at least to the early Corbyn Project, then I would know who that person was, and I am not aware of anyone, so no such figure existed. Think on.

But I digress. The racism of the Labour Right in general, and in particular in the North East where it was hegemonic until very recently, is not news to me. Jamie's election is an existential matter for those of us who, being less than 100 per cent Northern European, might be mistaken for Gypsies by McGuinness or her supporters. It would be physically unsafe for us to live in the North East under her.

See also Liz Twist, into the new constituency invented for whom more than half the population of North West Durham is to be moved, and who not only failed to vote for a ceasefire in Gaza, but returned to the frontbench by taking the place of someone who had resigned in order to do so. She is the Blaydon Racist. Bloody Betty, you can't hide, we charge you with genocide. If Twist were Consett's MP, then I would be unable to visit the town closest to my home. Since I am not a pureblood Aryan, then Twist or one of her goons might take me for a Palestinian and kill me. Yet some of my ilk live there.

Lanchester is being moved into North Durham, and Kevan Jones is right that, in the matter of the Post Office scandal, Parliament could and should overturn a long list of criminal convictions and order compensation. It could also do that for all convictions and other adverse court decisions arising out of the three Miners' Strikes since 1970. Does Kevan agree with me that it should? See you on the stump.

Kevan was commendably prominent in questioning the role of Luke Coffey, an American intelligence operative who was a special adviser to Liam Fox when Fox was the Secretary of State for Defence. Yet the United States is at least a British ally. The new MP for Kingswood, Damien Egan, is married to Yossi Felberbaum, a recruiter for the IDF's Unit 8200, an infamous collector of intelligence for blackmail and for secret evidence. Will this person be issued with a parliamentary pass? Is Kevan going to ask? Again, see you on the stump.

In spite of everything, I have no fear, since the Israeli operation in London does not seem to be doing terribly well. It scandalously ordered the King's Ministers to order arrests, and they treasonably complied, with the Police also having serious questions to answer about the fact that they obeyed the orders of politicians. But at five o'clock, BBC radio listeners were informed that 12 people, out of at least a quarter of a million, had been arrested, albeit for "offences including assaulting Police Officers". By 6:30, the number was unchanged, but the reference to assault had disappeared. At 7:30, an unspecified number of the 12 had been arrested for having "assaulted emergency workers". That was still the line at 10 o'clock. Let's see where we are in the morning.

Both parties are determined to demean themselves and this country by continuing this farce. 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 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.