Essential Services and Basic Necessities

Like Antony Blinken, Grant Shapps would now be ineligible for Labour Party membership as an anti-Semite. What would Keir Starmer say if Britain followed the United States and banned the leaders of West Bank settler violence from entering this country? Any Labour MP who proposed that would lose the whip, and any other member of the Labour Party would be expelled.

Starmer was pretty much jeered out of Glasgow today by the 76 per cent of the British population that had to put up with being superciliously informed by a comedian that we did not know the names of the River and the Sea. George Galloway is standing for Mayor of London because Jeremy Corbyn is not. Corbyn would certainly have been the First Past the Post, and George will at least take more votes than the margin of victory. With what he is saying not only about Gaza, but also about issues from knife crime to ULEZ, then do not bet against his doing a lot better than that.

It is over to David Baddiel to be the candidate of a tiny extremist minority that refuses to integrate. That was what it was over Iraq, when 90 per cent of the population opposed the war, and that is what it is on Gaza. Unlike then, it has already lost the Foreign Office, and it appears to have lost the Ministry of Defence as well. Its last hope is a Labour Government. Labour is now the greater evil, worse than the Tories. We should no more want it to win the next General Election than most of its MPs wanted it to win the last two, or than any of its staff wanted it to win the last four.

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 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.