To Respond Appropriately

Backed to the hilt by the US, the EU and all the rest of them, Israel's Gross Domestic Product fell by 19.4 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2023. Yet while Britain may be in recession, Russia has economic growth of 2.6 per cent. Would someone sanction us, please?

The American military colonies of Japan and South Korea are the only predominantly non-white countries to have sanctioned Russia. Israel has not done so, and Israel is not predominantly white, although it is run that way, and that is the basis of its support in the West. There used to be somewhere else like that, although it must be said that South Africa used to play the game. Israel just does as it pleases.

The MV Rubymar was sailing from the United Arab Emirates, which is now in the BRICS club, to Bulgaria, which until next month has an exemption from the EU's ban on seaborne imports of Russian crude oil, thereby maintaining supplies to a Russian-owned refinery the products of which are exported throughout the EU.

It would have been a bit much to have killed people in Yemen merely because of the forced evacuation of the entirely unharmed and entirely non-British crew of a Belizean-flagged vessel owned by a Lebanese subsidy of a British-registered company. But if it was carrying Russian oil into the EU from an important British ally that was particularly close to David Cameron personally? Gosh.

Ukraine is exactly as we predicted all along; follow that link. Although it is not impossible, no one of any importance in Russia would have considered Alexei Navalny worth murdering. Those who are screeching that "everyone" says that he must have been murdered are those who would have us believe that "the international community" was sanctioning Russia. Most of the world thinks as much of the man who called us "cockroaches" as we do of the likeminded Svoboda, Pravy Sektor, National Corps, C14, Azov Battalion, Aidar Battalion, Donbas Battalion, Dnipro-1 Battalion, Dnipro-2 Battalion, Kraken Regiment, Freedom of Russia Legion, Russian Volunteer Corps, Benjamin Netanyahu, Bezalel Smotrich, Itamar Ben-Gvir, Joe Biden, Emmanuel Macron, Javier Milei, Juan Guaidó, Keir Starmer, or Kim McGuinness.

The middle-aged do sometimes just drop dead, and by design the conditions in FKU IK-3 would be more than averagely likely to bring that on. Tormenting dead prisoners' families over the whereabouts of their bodies is the kind of cruelty that such regimes inflict routinely. Practically no one in Russia had ever heard of Navalny. On Saturday, "At least 212 people have been detained," apparently. One in 676,415. Yet today, Navalny's proclaimed spokeswoman, one Kira Yarmysh who is presumably a medium, has told the BBC that there would be no demonstrations. Were there ever any? By whom?

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 Vladimir 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. It is all here.

Voices that understood these things need to be heard, so George Galloway cannot win the Rochdale by-election too soon, and the Emiratis cannot buy the Telegraph Group and The Spectator too soon, either. Beyond that, 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.