Remembrance Alliance

Oh, Jeremy Corbyn - The Big Lie is now on YouTube. If "woman" means "adult human female" again, as it always should have done, then "anti-Semitism" means "hostility to or prejudice against Jews" again, as it always should have done. No more and no less, in either case.

What does the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance have to say about Kim McGuinness? Extraordinarily many people do not know that she is a racist, and she has campaigned barely, if at all. There has been little or no polling of voting intentions for the North East Metro Mayoral Election, and now that many postal votes have already been returned, then the publicity that her racism ought always have attracted would have only a greatly reduced impact. I smell a rat.

One hopes that, once elected, Jamie Driscoll will remember who had, and who had not, fielded candidates against him at this First Past the Post election. Look to Scotland for what getting into bed with the Greens gets you. 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.

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. The ball is now in the WPB's court. The state of Stanley after 23 years of Kevan Jones does not make the case for four or five more, and no one has been arrested as a result of the Post Office scandal. Why does Kevan want Starmer to become Prime Minister? Starmer lobbied successfully to make it easier for himself, and only the Director of Public Prosecutions in person, to halt a private prosecution. Yet either he never noticed that subpostmasters had suddenly moved from being archetypal pillars of the community to being prosecuted for dishonesty at a rate of one in seven, or he never saw it as a problem. He never took over any Post Office private prosecution and halted it, but he took over several and turned them into public prosecutions, sending the pregnant Seema Misra to prison with Rose West. That was a public prosecution, by Starmer. It was not the only one.

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.