Russia of the Future?

We shall never know what caused the death of the thoroughly unpleasant Alexei Navalny, a racist and fantasist to rank with Juan Guaidó or Kim McGuinness. My local political enemies call me "The Cockroach", because I "would survive a nuclear war". Don't mess with us cockroaches. "Speedboat", by the way, refers to Jim Bowen's "Look at what you could have won" as Bully's Star Prize was revealed to have been such a craft. Those who call me "Speedboat" still drink with me. Those who call me "The Cockroach" no longer do, if they ever did. I am proud to say that Navalny would have been one of the latter.

Navalny was not the "Russian Opposition Leader". There were only ever small demonstrations in support of Mr Cockroaches, as there were in support of Guaidó, and as there are, of sorts, in support of McGuinness, whose events are nothing if not cosy. Navalny's electoral unpopularity was mercifully well-established, as Guaidó's would have been if it had ever been tested, and as McGuinness's very soon will be. Most people in Russia were lucky enough never to have heard of Navalny, as most people in Venezuela are lucky enough never to have heard of Guaidó, and as most people in the North East of England will always be lucky enough never to have heard of McGuinness.

Not that Navalny should have been imprisoned. But take no lectures on that from anyone who did not actively support the release of Julian Assange, who has none of the bad points either of Navalny or of Donald Trump, opposition to the lawfare against whom should also be a prerequisite for being taken seriously. On both counts, that test is failed by all four of the Conservative Party, the Labour Party, the Liberal Democrats, and now also the SNP.

But this General Election offers the chance to return at least one true dissident in the person of Andrew Feinstein, who, among many other good things, would shine on the failings of the South African Government a light otherwise seen in Britain only by regular readers of the Morning Star or by those who followed George Galloway closely, all the while without any nostalgia for apartheid either explicitly, or in the form of opposition to South Africa's action before the International Court of Justice against the genocide of Gaza. Those who indulge in that have either never heard of, for example, the Marikana massacre, or they approve of it and quite possibly profited from it.

And 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.