Takes On Today's Proceedings

What a way to mark this hundredth anniversary of the first ever rebellion against a Labour Government, by the Reverend Herbert Dunnico, MP for Consett, on a pro-peace principle and because proper procedure had not been followed.

The Government may have had more than one reason for withdrawing its amendment. Today's debate featured several re-emergences of Tory Arabism, and of course the Foreign Office is in the hands of David Cameron and Andrew Mitchell, who are from the background that idolises T.E Lawrence and Sir John Glubb. 

As is the next King, who will be the most English King of England in a thousand years, although the one after that will have almost nothing else in him, in a curious reversal of the demographic trends in Britain at large. Ethnically, whereas the King is three quarters German, his grandson in the direct line of succession is three quarters English, and will probably be on the Throne in 2066.

I am as critical as anyone of Britain's alliances with the Arab monarchies, but funnily enough no one has ever asked me to be Foreign Secretary. Those alliances are real, and they are of very long standing, whereas there simply is not one with Israel.

The Palestinians will tell you in no uncertain terms that the Arab monarchs had never done a damn thing for them, but this time only the Anglo-American service station of Bahrain has actively come out against them or their protectors. This is the first genocide to be broadcast in real time, and it can be seen in the Gulf as well as anywhere else. On his mother's side, the next King of Jordan is a Palestinian. The present one, a key British ally, has said "from the River to the Sea", although he was unlikely to have wanted a Labour Party membership card. Mind you, these days, you never know.

Although sadly it does not extend to the Leadership, the widespread shift in Labour is precisely because much of it no longer is in thrall to an ethnic lobby of recent immigrant origin and owing fealty to a foreign state that had been founded in living memory by anti-British terrorists and which had never become a British ally, a lobby largely made up of self-appointed community leaders.

Labour will no doubt claim that the House of Commons had resolved for a ceasefire as it purported to understand that simple word, for the release of hostages, for international aid to Gaza, and for the recognition of Palestine, but of course the eventual vote was meaningless even as Opposition days went. Having voted for a ceasefire last time, Ian Lavery's name was added without his knowledge to the Labour amendment, which condemned Hamas but not Israel, and which wanted Israel to be "safe and secure" while a Palestinian state needed only to be "viable". Mary Kelly Foy's name was also there, yet she is absent following a bereavement. Are there any more?

Of course Justin Welby, who refused to meet Dr Munther Isaac because Dr Isaac had appeared on a platform with Jeremy Corbyn, is a state operative, because that is what the Archbishop of Canterbury is by definition. As ever with the British Establishment, the question is which state. There are three possibilities, and while they can run in two orders, Britain is always third on the list.

Of course Welby has his problem with the safeguarding-industrial complex, but that is as fraudulent as Prevent. In 2014, for purely ideological reasons, a couple were able to move what were then their five very young children, British citizens all, from the English village with the seventh highest house prices outside London, to a warzone, where two of them were killed last year, one while still only 15 years of age. So much for Social Services. And so much for Prevent, which is founded on a proven hoax.

Of course Muslims care as much about the cost of living crisis as they do about Gaza. Of course the rest of us care as much about Gaza as we do about the cost of living crisis. And of course we are all more than capable of seeing the connection, of understanding why no one with our patronisers' foreign policies ever had economic policies that would be remotely to our benefit.

For example Keir Starmer and Sue Gray, who have today inflicted a whipping operation on the Speaker of the House of Commons, telling him that he would be removed after the General Election if he did not do the procedurally and constitutionally bizarre thing of calling an amendment other than the Government's to an Opposition day motion. Everyone else has made their points on the Order Paper.

Although they may have been assisted by the fact that Sir Lindsay Hoyle was a second generation Labour MP, as steeped in it as that, Starmer is an inexperienced politician, and Gray is not one in the conventional sense at all. Yet yesterday, we had a Chief of Staff making policy, while today we had her doing this. Gray is very dangerous, and Starmer's dependence on her is one of the many reasons why so is he.

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.