Lest We Forget

They must think that Remembrance Sunday is on a Saturday. I blame those public schools, with years having three halves and what not.

Armistice Day is the perfect day to march for a ceasefire, but it has been a normal working, shopping and drinking day for, what, 40 years? Everything was moved to the Sunday years ago. Have there never been Downing Street demonstrations on it before? I bet there have been.

This reminds me of when Theresa May made a fuss about poppies at an England versus Scotland football match on 11th November, without stopping to wonder that there was one at all.

We are back to Iraq, when everyone was anti-war apart from the only people who were ever asked. We sat and watched what appeared to be television from a completely foreign country, as a pro-war Minister, a pro-war "Opposition" spokesperson, and two pro-war "journalists", agreed with each other and with the pro-war employee of the state broadcaster. Too bad for 90 per cent of the population then, and too bad for 76 per cent of the population now, although it will be a lot more even than that in another week's time.

But when I tell you that there is going to be a hung Parliament, then you can take that to the bank. I spent the 2005 Parliament saying that it was psephologically impossible for the Heir to Blair's Conservative Party to win an overall majority. I predicted a hung Parliament on the day that the 2017 General Election was called, and I stuck to that, entirely alone, all the way up to the publication of the exit poll eight long weeks later. And on the day that Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister, I predicted that a General Election between him and Keir Starmer would result in 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.