True Confidence?

Well, what do you know? The Americans are going to build a port right next to the Gaza Marine gas field. Since, at least ostensibly, its initial function will be to supply aid, then they had better hope that the Israelis did not use their vast and ever-growing collection of American weapons to bomb it. Perhaps they would be polite enough not to do so, and instead use their vast and ever-growing collection of British ones?

Even based only on what is indisputably in the public domain, of course we are in this war. We are supplying one side with armaments. That is what is openly admitted, and that would be enough. But there is more. For example, the RAF is supplying the IDF from Cyprus, to which the SAS has been deployed even only in the terms that are covered by a D-notice. In fact it is in Gaza, where it is preparing to install Tony Blair as the Viceroy of Gaza Marine, vicereigning, we now see, from Port Biden, and thus on behalf of a foreign state that quite rightly would not do anything like this for us.

Likewise, of course there are British troops on the ground in Ukraine, firing Storm Shadow cruise missiles. Among other things. Notice how little comment this non-revelation is attracting, even though it flatly contradicts what has repeatedly been told to Parliament. Congratulations to Sweden on its admission to a club from which you can be blackballed by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan or Viktor Orbán. How very well worth the loss of Sweden's role in international humanitarian relief. How very well worth closing the investigation into the attack on the Nord Stream pipeline, a closure that speaks for itself.

Like their British counterparts, the Swedish Armed Forces will now be integrated into a command structure with those which were under the command of Erdoğan and Orbán. Officers answerable to them will have authority over Swedish personnel, as they already have over British personnel. It will be the Azov Brigade next. In practice, it probably already is. Our own centrists also want us to be subject again to the legislative will of Orbán and of everyone else who turned up on the Council of Ministers or in the European Parliament. To an extent, we have never stopped being. For example, the increase in the VAT threshold to £90,000 is still as far as we are allowed to go. Yet we who oppose these things are the extremists. Of course.

As centrism and right-wing populism are con tricks, designed to sell the same economic and foreign policies to different audiences by pretending to wage a culture war, so, while pre-existing conservative phenomena have been known to ally with Fascism, usually to their own ruin, it is the liberal bourgeoisie that keeps Fascism in reserve for when it might ever face any serious demand to share its economic or social power with anyone who did not have it before the rise of the bourgeois liberal order, or to share its cultural or political power with anyone at all. We are cockroaches, to use the word preferred by Alexei Navalny, who turns out to have died of natural causes, exactly as I said on here at the time. It is quite common for the middle-aged to drop dead. His funeral was a damp squib, for all the fuss that the Western media insisted on making of it. Next to no one in Russia had ever heard of him, and lucky them. How many have ever heard of Oleg Orlov, either?

It has taken longer than the admission that Navalny probably just had a heart attack, albeit in prison camp conditions, and was certainly not directly murdered, but the OPCW has admitted that it was the so-called Islamic State, the side that we were backing in Syria and which Israel actively still is, that used mustard gas in that country in 2015. And the three deaths of crew members of the MV True Confidence, with the injuries to their shipmates, are the first deaths and injuries ever to have resulted from the Houthis' blockade against the Gaza genocide. Yet we have already killed rather more than three people merely for having lived near the scraps of ground from which had been launched drones that had rarely so much as damaged inanimate objects.

In the opinion of the Government and of the Official Opposition alike, entirely peaceful, and indeed carnival-like, protests against these things are simultaneously mob rule and Islamist control, as if anything could be both. 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 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. We have made a start.