Non Sibi Sed Toti

Why has Zack Polanksi released a campaign video in Urdu? The census found only 256 Urdu-speakers in Camden, plus 177 speakers of Hindi, which is mutually comprehensible with Urdu in day-to-day speech. There were even fewer of any other South Asian language. Apart from Bengali, with 4,080. Nor was there any suggestion that any of those people could not speak English. They just spoke something else at home. Someone is having Polanski on.

Enoch Powell used to speak to his constituents in Urdu, probably a lot more proficiently than Polanski has managed. Powell also published in Welsh, the first language of some of his relatives. No doubt, then, it would have gladdened his heart to have seen Wales vote for Brexit, an event that has been written out of the script, with Plaid Cymru, Sinn Féin and the SNP, each of which has been staunchly Eurosceptical in its time, declaring today that, "We believe the future of our nations belongs in the European Union."

Ireland, as ever, is a different story, but there would be several EU member states that would always and on principle veto the accession of a separatist entity even if it had seceded from a state that had itself withdrawn from the EU. They cannot be giving ideas to, say, Flanders or Catalonia. Would EU membership complicate the extradition of Nicola Sturgeon from her new home in London to answer a charge of reset, knowingly possessing items that had been stolen or bought thanks to fraud or embezzlement, for which she was now under investigation? Why would Scotland or Wales want to be unlike Iceland, but instead like the EU candidate countries of Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, Moldova, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Turkey? Why would Scotland or Wales want to be like the EU candidate country of Serbia, which recently gave what amounted to a state funeral to a man convicted of genocide? Or why would Scotland or Wales want to be like the EU candidate country of Ukraine, which is trying to remove its Prosecutor General for having run a network of fraudulent call centres? And you thought that Keir Starmer was bad.

Unlike Ireland, none of the EU candidate countries was among the 12 that recently sanctioned the West Bank settlements, so which way would Scotland or Wales have jumped, and why? In Ukraine, a member of the British Armed Forces has just been killed, or at least that death has just been announced. Boots on the ground. Who knew? And what for? According to the ubiquitous Radek Sikorski, even without NATO, Poland alone could defeat Russia "quite quickly" due to its "overwhelming superiority in air power". No need for NATO, then. Jolly good. Sikorski was previously noted for his public gratitude to the United States for having deliberately damaged the Nord Stream pipeline. His post was hastily deleted, but absolutely no one any longer pretends that that damage had been done by the Russians.

Cheering this on is Polanski, obscenely a warmongering vegan. But nothing is environmentally more destructive than a war, and this war is the latest reason stated for the benefit cuts, for the cuts to public services, and for the assaults on civil liberties, that those who advocated them have always wanted for some ostensible reason. The Green Party has rightly welcomed the impending renationalisation of Speciality Steel UK, yet it seems to have no idea how steel was manufactured, and thus where turbines, or public transport infrastructure, came from. "Do you regret the defeat of the miners in 1984?" is a yes-no question, and the one-word answer to it should decide between support for Polanski or support for George Galloway.