War Cry

If we are not at war with Iran, then why does anyone want to ban marches? If we are not at war with Iran, then why does Chris Philp want to shut down the Islamic Centre of England? And if we are not at war with Iran, then why does it attack us? Yet all it does is fail to injure anyone or even to damage anything in Akrotiri, and set fire to empty and decommissioned ambulances in Golders Green. So we are clearly not important in this war, yet we are clearly in it. What could be worse?

And for what? For whom? The second President of the United States in succession is obviously senile, and this one is surrounded by people who have made fortunes betting on what they knew to be the imminent invasion of Venezuela, the imminent attack on Iran, and Donald Trump's imminent post about "productive" talks with Iran, a post that they knew was bound to send the price of crude oil tumbling.

That's capitalism. That's postmen being told to hide our post so that the Royal Mail could pretend to have met its delivery targets. When Daniel Křetínský effectively told the Business Select Committee that no private company could possibly be expected to meet the Universal Service Obligation, then Liam Byrne was right to reply that he had known about that when he had bought it, but should have added that he had just made the case for the Royal Mail to be in the public sector.

When the price of a second class stamp goes above one pound, then the Revolution should begin. I am serious. The squalor to which Royal Mail has been reduced is the perfect example of everything against which that revolt would be necessary. It was privatised by the under-scrutinised Liberal Democrats, since the Business Secretary on every day of the Coalition was Vince Cable, and the Postal Affairs Minister under him at the point of privatisation was Ed Davey. Oh, the comments that I used to have to reject when I mentioned that the Post Office had had to be cut out of the Royal Mail in 2011 so that the Royal Mail could be privatised, because the City had known, even then, about Horizon, and would have refused to have handled the sale, much less bought the shares. On 24 May 2024, that was confirmed in open court.

Tony Blair knew about Horizon in 1998, but Peter Mandelson made him go through with it. In 2009, 10 years into Horizon, Mandelson tried to offload 30 per cent of the undivided Royal Mail. The eventual privatisation made vast profits for the 16 priority investors, which had been chosen because they were seen as stable and long-term. 12 sold out within weeks. One such, which secured £36 million in six months, was Lansdowne Partners, and one of those Partners was Peter Davies, who had been best man at the first, and then only, wedding of the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne.

Osborne and Mandelson were both shortlisted for the position of Ambassador to the United States, and Osborne has since incredibly claimed that he would not have signed off on Mandelson's payourt, but it was on his way home from Osborne's residence that Mandelson was photographed in November urinating in the street. Mandelson's clearly close friend until recently, Osborne, married again in 2023, and the guests included his close friend and podcast partner, Ed Balls, with Balls's wife, Yvette Cooper. Cooper's candidate at Gorton and Denton was endorsed by Cable. Round and round it goes.

Round and round it goes on Epstein Island, with only Epstein Class parties in its Parliament: centrists, right-wing populists, right-wing elitists, and those for whom Noam Chomsky might vote. To give only one example, Mandelson arranged for Alex Karp, CEO of Global Counsel's client Palantir, to have an unregistered and unminuted meeting with Keir Starmer, and now, without any competitive tendering, Peter Thiel has more than half a billion pounds' worth of our National Health Service and of our Ministry of Defence, all linked up to the IDF and to ICE. Essex Police has already had to "pause" its live facial recognition because it targeted black people in general and black men in particular, but its only mistake was to get caught, since fear of the black male is fundamental to the capitalist system that was founded on the transatlantic slave trade, and the slave trade financed enclosure, so that there has always been One Struggle. So LFR will be back, and connected to the digital ID that will be provided by the Tony Blair Institute. That is Tony Blair of Trump's Board of Peace.

We are at war for this, with any peace to be brokered by Pakistan, which is at war with Afghanistan because Narendra Modi has used the Taliban to take colonial possession of it. The Durand Line is as meaningless as the Sykes-Picot Line. The P in Pakistan is Punjab, the a is Afghania (i.e., the Pashtun homeland of which most of the area is in Afghanistan, but there remain two and a half times as many Pashtuns in Pakistan), the k is Kashmir, the i was added "for ease of pronunciation" to sound more Urdu and less Punjabi, the s is Sindh, and the tan is Balochistan. But of those, only Sindh has ever been wholly in Pakistan. Part of Bolchistan is in Afghanistan, while rather more of it is in Iran. It is fundamental to Pakistan that Amritsar, Kandahar and Srinagar and are all naturally and rightfully Pakistani cities. And it is fundamental to Pakistan that Zahedan is, too. Think on.