To Resolve All Outstanding Issues

Hope springs eternal for the Chagossian people. Remember that support for them continues to be held up by the people now running the Labour Party as the most hilariously cranky thing about the previous Leadership. Is that because they are a bunch of CIA shills? In a few cases, and those are important cases, yes. Mostly, though, it is because they are intimidated by anyone who has ever read anything. You have to have dealt with the Blairites at close quarters to appreciate quite how aggressively ignorant they are.

Should there ever come to be a Labour candidate here at North West Durham, then I would love beyond words laying into his, her or its certificate-waving anti-intellectualism and petit bourgeois inverted snobbery. I do have an old score to settle, a sore that will have been running for 20 years in April, when it comes to that preference for pretty boys from the football team, who go on to be employed far beyond their natural abilities for the rest of their working lives. They will not get to beat up the swot for a laugh this time.

It was the Labour Right, in the ghoulish persons of Denis Healey and David Miliband, that inflicted and then compounded the wrong against the Chagossians, so, with a Government of the Labour Left ruled out, it is only to be expected that it is a Conservative Government that offers any hope of righting that wrong. If most people in Britain knew about this story, then it would be a very popular cause.

Labour's poll lead has already fallen from 36 per cent to 19 per cent in a fortnight, with Rishi Sunak now leading Keir Starmer by six points, which is outside the margin of error. We are heading for a hung Parliament. To strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty, we need to hold the balance of power. Owing nothing to either main party, we must be open to the better offer. There does, however, need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not.