Security Counsel

Judgment in the case of Julian Assange is expected at 10:30. Keir Starmer should live forever in infamy for his role in that affair, but he also now stands exposed as a complete fool, with his support for the Gaza genocide no longer shared even by the Biden Administration. Antony Blinken or Linda Thomas-Greenfield would be sacked from the Labour frontbench, to be replaced with Bezalel Smotrich or Itamar Ben-Gvir, the only people in the world with whom Starmer still agreed.

Any Labour pretence to the contrary is only because George Galloway won the Rochdale by-election and has received 600 applications to contest the General Election on behalf of the Workers Party of Britain, in addition to the Independents who were already in the field against, among others, Starmer and Wes Streeting, whose majority was only 5,198 even before the boundary changes.

Shamima Begum has lost her initial bid to take her case to the Supreme Court. Those of us who agree with Jacob Rees-Mogg and Peter Hitchens about her should hope that they will join us in calling on the Government to be more than consistent. Begum went to join the side that we were backing in Syria, as Israel still is. As sworn enemies of Russia, IS fighters have been brought into Ukraine from Syria and elsewhere, making it perfectly possible that Ukraine and IS were both responsible for the attack on Crocus City Hall. We do not know that that is the case. But it certainly could be. That is the British Government's side, and NATO trafficked Begum to it.

Begum ought to be tried by a jury that, unless it were unanimously convinced beyond reasonable doubt of her guilt, ought to deliver a verdict of not guilty, which should be an enduring verdict, affording lifelong protection from double jeopardy, because that ought to be how it worked for everyone, as it used to be. In the event of such a conviction, then like a 15-year-old runner for county lines, she would not be blameless, but like a 15-year-old runner for county lines, she would not be the most to blame.

By contrast, Britain has just voted in the United Nations Security Council against the side that Begum's fellow natural born Londoner, Eylon Levy, has joined entirely voluntarily and as an adult. When is his British citizenship going to be revoked? If Starmer had been Prime Minister and David Lammy had been Foreign Secretary, then Levy would not even be suspended from his job as the war criminal that is a propagandist for war crimes, just as Starmer is a war criminal for having publicly egged on a war crime.

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.

I have no plan to join the Workers Party of Britain, although nor would I expect to stand against it. If, however, it did not contest North Durham, then I would. 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. We have made a start.