Utrinque Paratus

Afghanistan was clearly not worth the bones of one British soldier, and we should never again have any involvement in the place. Or, in that sense, in anywhere else. Whatever their cover story about the death of the Parachute Regiment's Lance Corporal George Hooley in Ukraine, his fate has added to their case that "We are at war", necessitating the "postponement" of the next General Election. Even Ukraine is supposedly now to go to the polls, but the repeated cancellation of local elections in Britain is softening us up. Do not be softened. Be hardened.

At the next General Election, numerous seats would be decided by a handful of votes as the square peg of a good half a dozen parties and many locally strong Independents were forced into the round hole of First Past the Post. Reform UK is facing the fury of its own supporters because one of its candidates for Portsmouth City Council is Addy Mo Asaduzzaman, a Bangladeshi who is exercising his rights as a Commonwealth citizen. Will they react in the same way when a Reform candidate was an Anglo-Australian or a white South African?

Ben Habib has registered Advance UK with the Electoral Commission as the party in which Stephen Yaxley-Lennon would be welcome, but a woman has already had to be removed from one of his meetings of it because she had segued from a well-received attack on Islam to an unwelcome criticism, both of Israeli influence in British politics, and, it must be said, of the Talmud, all while quoting Charlie Kirk. She was a recent Reform activist. Yes, it was only a Ten Minute Rule Bill. But alone among MPs either sitting or elected as Reform, Nigel Farage did not turn up to vote against re-joining the Customs Union, which passed on the Chair's casting vote with 100 votes on each side. The Liberal Democrats are going to make hay with that one. Farage's vote could have deprived them and their fellow-travellers of that. Where was he?

And when Jeremy Corbyn used to vote against the Blair Government, then the Conservatives voted with it. He did not vote with them. But unlike him, Zarah Sultana has voted to keep every Lords wrecking amendment to the Employment Rights Bill, even on strike ballot thresholds and on trade unions' political funds, amendments that had passed with the votes of Green Peers even though Green MPs then voted to overturn them. Sultana argued that the Government's own weakening of that Bill, concessions of which I have been as critical as anyone, had rendered it "inadequate". As with her call to "nationalise the entire economy", she is an infantile ultra-Leftist whom the Labour Party has to explain how and why it ever approved as a parliamentary candidate at all, never mind twice, the second time after a full term as an MP. As a Workers Party voter, I would not vote for a Green or, at least in anything like its present form, a Your Party candidate at the Workers Party's behest. I am not the only one. But we will all vote.