Decisive Action

The State of Israel is now at war with the Republic of Lebanon, which the United Kingdom recognises as a sovereign state, and which is at peace with His Majesty. Enlistment by a British citizen in the Israeli Defense Forces is therefore a criminal offence under the Foreign Enlistment Act 1870, if it has ever been anything else. There may be a policy of not prosecuting dual nationals who had been conscripted, but that is not the law, and anyone else would be bang to rights.

John Healey described Graham Jones's remarks as anti-Israel rather than anti-Semitic, but they were not even that, and Ed Balls was flailing that his Hard Right mate was being hard done by. Healey is still in the Shadow Cabinet and indeed in Parliament, whereas Balls has not been an active politician in nine years, so it was Healey who explained that any criticism of the Israeli Government now counted as anti-Semitism, thereby exposing how far out of the loop Balls was. Like a lot of other light entertainers, Balls egged on all of this under Jeremy Corbyn. But like them, he did not quite understand what it would mean in practice. And he certainly never expected it to come for his own faction.

Not for the white boys, anyway. Azhar Ali had to go when he was found to have been ranting about "the Jewish media". But if he had just said "the media", then everything that he had said about the case of Andy McDonald would have been incontrovertible, like Jones's, "Unless there is a military alliance between us and that particular country, NATO or whatever, no British person should be fighting for any other country." Who could disagree with that? Likewise, no one could have disagreed with Ali's remarks, except for one word that went beyond anything that had ever been alleged against anyone in the Corbyn years, allegations that were themselves false in every single case.

Ali is an old adviser to Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, and he is a stalwart of the Labour municipal mafia. That is an unusual combination, bestriding the electrified barbed wire fence between the Labour Right in the Westminster Village and what it sees as its organisation fodder in and around council chambers even in London, never mind in Lancashire. Ali is an exceptionally well-connected man, and he was Keir Starmer's choice of candidate at Rochdale, since Labour's byelection candidates are selected centrally.

If Rishi Sunak cannot handle Piers Morgan, then how could he handle Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, or Donald Trump? And if Starmer cannot oversee the selection of a byelection candidate, then how could he oversee the privatisation of the National Health Service, as favoured by the people who have always had grave reservations about him? He is not a product of the right-wing Labour machine, it has never trusted him, many of its cogs made no endorsement at the last Leadership Election, and its decay was evident from its inability to put its own candidate onto the ballot paper. But now Starmer has gone after one of its own. Well, two. But one who has the skin colour that counts.

Whatever the rights or wrongs of a demonstration outside Tobias Ellwood's home, and I do not recall his saying a word when Corbyn's residence was besieged for years, I remember a Labour MP whose only constituency office was inside her house, where her father had also had his. Same office. Same house. Same seat. Father and daughter. That world is still there, and its patience with the Starmer blow-in is starting to wear thin. It is hardly as if he can fall back on the Left.

Quite rightly, and take this from someone the contributors to whose magazine will be a lot more than the half of one per cent Jewish that the British population was, Ali had to be removed only once his remarks about the media had come out. This site has been asking questions about 7th October since 7th October:

"The truth of Hamas's attack would have been bad enough to have elicited a strong response. But not the response on which Benjamin Netanyahu was hellbent. Netanyahu did not get lucky. The bests spies in the world did not all miss this. And now, he has co-opted his opponents, he has marginalised and neutralised his rivals on the Right, he has silenced the judges, and he has usefully exposed the Western elites as cheerleaders for collective punishment and for genocide. At last, he will rank with his brother. A lot of the most effective politicians are psychopaths. They would get far less done if they were not."

Now, however, the line is apparently that the Israeli intelligence and security services were so inept that they really did all fail to see this coming, and woe betide anyone who suggested otherwise. While that may not make people sleep easier in their beds in Tel Aviv, it certainly makes me sleep easier in mine. And why are the British political parties, especially Labour, so frightened of such incompetents?

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 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.