Reconnecting People and Communities

The Go-Ahead Group has just afforded a week of free buses, so it could always have afforded to have equalised the pay of its drivers in the North East with that of its drivers in the North West.

As for cancelled buses because the drivers had "gone back to Poland after Brexit", and similar things across many industries and services, Brexit has not compelled anyone to go back to anywhere, and no one would be doing so if they were still being offered a better deal here.

As with the running down of public services so that they can be privatised, and that for almost nothing, this is starting to feel intentional. That same corporate state, of which the EU is itself a giant example, is determined to take us back in, insofar as we have ever left.

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.