A Triple Alliance?

Now that Diane Abbott will not be in the Shadow Cabinet, she will have, if anything, even more opportunity to pursue her consistent opposition to European federalism, her role as a voice of her ethnic community on immigration by people who cannot speak English or who come from countries with no historic ties to Britain, her support for action against such things as not giving up seats to elderly people on public transport, her opposition to the New Labour assault on civil liberties, her support for the renationalisation of the railways, her stand against wars of which Enoch Powell would not have approved, and her call to discard weapons that he denounced.

Even more time to express by word and deed her her sympathy for the 11-plus, for single-sex schools, for Oxbridge as academically elitist, for universities' flexible approach to entry grades if they see potential in the applicant, for the prevention of social rather than academic elitism by improving the schools attended by the poor, for raising poor pupils' aspirations so that they actually apply to the top universities, and for reinstating full grants so that they can afford to go.

She is both as free and as prominent as David Davis, and as either Simon Hughes or, less probably, Charles Kennedy. Free to form a triumvirate of the high-profile and the independent-minded.

Free to put down legislative amendments that would require British Ministers to adopt the show-stopping Empty Chair Policy in the Council of Ministers until such time as it meets in public and publishes an Official Report akin to Hansard, and to restore the annual votes on the Common Agricultural and Fisheries Policies, in order to use those votes to demand the abolition of those Policies.

Free to resist attempts further to dismantle the regimental system, or to abolish all three Armed Forces by "merging" them.

Free to defend security of tenure for council tenants, and to oppose the moving in of Shameless characters next door to those tenants, or even in place of them.

Free to put down amendments to return to a free country's minimum requirements for conviction, above all by reversing the erosion of the right to silence and of trial by jury, and by repealing the monstrous provisions for anonymous evidence and for conviction by majority verdict. To return to proper policing. And then, but only then, to return to proper sentencing, and to proper regimes in prison.

Free to use every parliamentary and other available means to call for a ban on anything paying any of its employees more than ten times what it pays any of its other employees, with the whole public sector functioning as a single entity for this purpose, and with its median wage fixed at the median wage in the private sector, to which manual jobs would no longer be outsourced.

Free to hold Iain Duncan Smith to the logical conclusion of his position, namely a unified system of taxation, benefits, pensions, minimum wage legislation and student funding to ensure that no one's tax-free income ever falls below half national median earnings, including a single form of Social Security payment, called simply Social Security, and guaranteeing that minimum income universally.

Free to campaign for the renationalisation of the railways, uniquely without compensation in view of the manner of their privatisation, as the basis for a national network of public transport free at the point of use, including the reversal of bus route and, where possible, rail line closures going back to the 1950s.

Free to demand that prescription charges, eye and dental charges, and hospital car parking charges be abolished.

Free to propose that the television license fee be made optional, with as many adults as wished to pay it at any given address free to do so, and with the Trustees would then be elected by and from among the license-payers. That model could certainly be applied, but with universal suffrage, to everything from the Press Complaints Commission to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, and arguably even to the Supreme Court, although in that case with only one candidate per region elected and with a vacancy arising only when a sitting member retired or died.

Free to secure a statutory ban on any person or other interest owning or controlling more than one national daily newspaper, or from owning or controlling more than one national weekly newspaper, or from owning or controlling more than one television station, as well as to re-regionalise ITV under a combination of municipal and mutual ownership. And to apply that same model (but with central government replacing local government, subject to very strict parliamentary scrutiny) to Channel Four.

And free to agitate for a Coroner's Inquest that has mysteriously never been held into the death of Dr David Kelly.

Among many, many, many other things.

So, will they do it?