Post Facto

The Post Office has its own prosecution powers, long pre-dating the Crown Prosecution Service, although it cannot any longer expect anyone to convict on its say-so. The exoneration of its victims should be written into the legislation that formally abolished those powers.

But the line today is that those were in principle private prosecutions, such as the RSPCA also brings and such as anyone might bring if they could afford to. The Post Office is the State, yet that is the line today. In that case, though, the Director of Public Prosecutions does have the power to take over any private prosecution and shut it down if he judged that its continuation would not be in the public interest. So Keir Starmer does have questions to answer.

The Post Office was ridiculously split from the Royal Mail, with staff left at adjacent desks that their employers were renting from each other, before the Royal Mail was flogged off in a foretaste of the PPE fraud. Yet no party proposes to reverse this massively unpopular folly.

Not the Labour Party, which is back under the control of Peter Mandelson, who once tried to do it. Not the Conservatives, who were in office when it was done and who benefitted massively from it. And not the Liberal Democrats, who were in office with them and who directly did it. As we see from Ed Davey and Herbert Smith Freehills, even by political standards, Lib Dem finances are very murky indeed. Yet this is the party, the more pro-austerity and pro-war party to the Coalition, that the boundaries have been fiddled to restore as the agenda-setter.

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.