A Landmark Moment

On one level, who cares what Rishi Sunak says about 2030, when he will not have set foot in this country in years? But notice that £75 billion can be found just like that. Not a penny can be found to make this a country worth defending. Instead, Fujitsu and Infosys are to be contracted to declare Britain's vast numbers of the chronically sick fit for work, thereby neither curing them nor finding them jobs, but entitling them to only one year of Jobseeker's Allowance. Thames Water is to be bailed out at any price that it cared to set. And so on, and on, and on, and on, and on, all backed to the hilt by an Official Opposition that, moreover, wanted to privatise England's NHS.

It is no concern of ours which country Kharkiv should be in. But ever since the end of the Cold War, it has always been "the most dangerous time since the end of the Cold War". Our Armed Forces are so tiny, so badly paid, and so badly equipped, that even when you remembered that we counted things like military pensions, the Coast Guard, the Met Office, and the BBC World Service, then someone is still being paid on an enormous scale. Such is the British way, from HS2, to PPE, to Test and Trace, to the Bibby Stockholm, to Rwanda. The arms companies are very good at kicking back to politicians and at employing retired top brass. For only the twenty-second highest population in the world, the sixth highest military spending is still not enough for some people, because they are the hired megaphones of corporate greed.

In any case, a huge proportion of that figure is Trident, which we have instead of tanks, fighter jets, and indeed personnel for our own country, never mind for anywhere else, including Ukraine, which has been for many months in exactly the permanent stalemate that some of us predicted from day one. Russia makes no claim to any British territory. Nor does China, Iran, North Korea, or anywhere else on the latest Axis of Evil. The Hard Right's latest Fatherland is the only country from which there is any risk of an invasion of British soil. The Hard Right's apparently permanent Motherland recently murdered three British veterans who, as is common, were working simultaneously as aid workers and as intelligence operatives. But we are not allowed to mention that, just as we are not allowed to mention that Motherland's assistance of that Fatherland's last invasion.

Instead of NATO, we need bilateral nonaggression treaties with all other European countries including Russia and indeed Ukraine, with the United States, and with Canada. We need nonaggression treaties with the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and with the Collective Security Treaty Organisation, and preferably with each of their members bilaterally. There should be no foreign military bases on British soil, while military force should be used only ever in self-defence, and only ever with the approval of the House of Commons, the composition of which therefore needs to be changed dramatically.

BAE Systems should be renationalised as the monopoly supplier to our own Armed Forces, with a ban on all sale of arms abroad, and with a comprehensive programme of diversification in the spirit of the Lucas Plan. Armed neutrality never includes the nuclear weapons that are purely offensive. Instead of Trident, an extra £70 billion should be given to each of the Royal Navy, the British Army, and the Royal Air Force. This would not entail depriving anything else of funding. As a sovereign state with its own free-floating, fiat currency, the United Kingdom has as much of that currency as it chooses to issue to itself, with the fiscal and monetary means to control inflation, means that therefore need to be under democratic political control in both cases.

Wishful thinking? Well, 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 Sunak became Prime Minister, I predicted that a General Election between him and Keir 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.