Legitimate Targets

In restoring the two pound cap on bus fares, and in pausing the early release scheme, Andy Burnham can say that he was not even in Parliament when the damage was done. He has none of the shamelessness of Keir Starmer's restoration of the Winter Fuel Payment that he had taken away in the first place, never mind of Starmer's claim that his proudest achievement in office was to have lifted the two-child benefit cap when he had withdrawn the whip from seven Labour MPs because they had voted for nothing more than such an amendment to the Humble Address, and when that amendment had been defeated, then they had voted with the Government.

But Burnham has kept up Starmer's barefaced lie that Britain was not a participant in Donald Trump's and Benjamin Netanyahu's war on Iran, in which the single largest loss of life has been the bombing of the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls' primary school in Minab with Tomahawks the components for which were manufactured by Raytheon at Glenrothes. And now the USAF base that hides behind the name of RAF Fairford has been identified as a potential target for Iranian retaliation.

How do the occupants of those bases comport themselves? First there was Anne Sacoolas, and now this. As for the Israelis, having armed Argentina during the Falklands War, they are on the cusp of formally recognising Argentine sovereignty over the Falkland Islands because of their very close relationship with Javier Milei. Trump also has such a relationship, to the point that like Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir he expressly supported Argentina against England in the World Cup, and he is now reviewing what has always been American neutrality on the principle of sovereignty, mindful of the Monroe Doctrine that the American Republic was to expel the European colonial powers from its hemisphere from Greenland to South Georgia. The only British member of Trump's Board of Peace is a member of the Labour Party. Burnham should expel him, and not stop expelling there.

The expulsion of Tony Blair from the Labour Party, and his removal from the Privy Council as an agent of a foreign and increasingly hostile power, would be quite the Clause IV moment. As, following the most welcome dismissal of Richard Hermer, would be the cancellation of David Lammy's completion of David Miliband's reinforcement of Denis Healey's crime against the people of the Chagos Islands. A Chagossian contingent for the Parade of Nations ought to have picketed the Opening Ceremony of the Commonwealth Games. The Closing Ceremony will be held at the OVO Hydro, at 9pm on Sunday 2 August.