Beating The Panel

On Question Time tonight, two out of five panellists have the Labour whip in Parliament, and it is not even as if either of them is critical of the Leadership. One of them has been raised to the peerage purely for having spent years on end telling cheap but well-paid jokes about Jeremy Corbyn. Long after he had ceased to be Leader or even to sit as a Labour MP, she was still doing that on Radio Four and wherever it was that very strange people went to see that kind of thing live.

There is a highly active body of ex-Labour Independent Councillors in Liverpool, and one of them is the well-known children's writer Alan Gibbons. Why is he not on this instead of one of the two Starmerities, neither of whom is based in Liverpool or has any apparent connection to the place? Truly, institutional Britain has decided that 15 or 20 years of a Starmer-Streeting Government are a done deal, and it is making its peace with that. The very procedures of the House of Commons are now made up on the hoof to suit that assumption.

I have no plan to join the Workers Party of Britain, but nor would I expect to stand against it. If, however, it did not contest North Durham, then I would. 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. We have made a start.