Hope Over Experience?

The bus to Durham was late, and the bus back to Lanchester never came. Yet Britain is supposed to have become a Fascist dictatorship. If only. Never mind, I had a good time in between. Sir Ridley Scott earns his knighthood. Napoleon is full of actors whose faces British viewers would know, yet whose names we probably would not. He is still a trouper. But Saint Helena is hotter than that. It is not a Hebride. During the Falklands War, my mother was told that she must have felt right at home with the weather in Burnhope. She did not.

Although there was talk of Ascension Island, no one seems to be suggesting sending people to Saint Helena. Let's not give them ideas. Robert Jenrick was so bent that even Boris Johnson had to sack him. Restored to office by Rishi Sunak, Jenrick ordered the painting over of a mural of Mickey Mouse because he was too close to home. Jenrick's job has been split in two and handed over to a pair of what appear to be further fictional characters. The cost of the Rwanda scheme has been confirmed to have doubled, all without anyone's ever having been sent there. Someone is being paid. A lot. For, officially, absolutely nothing.

Yet what are we offered instead? By not declaring Second Reading of the Rwanda Bill to be a matter of confidence, Sunak has given Labour permission to abstain on whatever technicality it can dream up. If the Labour whip were to vote against, then we would know that there were not enough Conservative rebels for this Bill to be defeated.

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 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.