Not Red-Brown, More Red-Blue

A seven times elected Member of Parliament is in the Premier League while a seven times failed parliamentary candidate is not even a ball boy, a job that is sometimes done by a dog, but George Galloway did campaign with Nigel Farage in the 2016 referendum, and he did endorse the Brexit Party at the 2019 European elections. Richard Tice offered George a byelection candidacy. George has kept the receipts.

George advocated a vote for the candidate best placed to defeat the SNP in each Holyrood constituency last time, plus a list vote for All for Unity, and accordingly he voted Conservative. Subsequent events have thoroughly borne him out. In 2006, it was a coalition with the Conservatives that retained the Leadership of Derby City Council for Chris Williamson. That coalition did eventually lose an election to the Liberal Democrats, but it did not collapse.

When George is introduced tomorrow, then it will be by Jeremy Corbyn and David Davis, an economically left-wing Eurosceptic and opponent of American, Israeli and Saudi domination, and a socially conservative Brexiteer with regular reservations about the foreign policy hegemony. If Rishi Sunak meant what he said about George on Friday evening, then he would withdraw the whip from Davis.

For as long as I can remember, condescending Telegraph types of the kind who are all about to discover how many foreign holidays per year you really can have on Universal Credit, or they would not care about losing their jobs, have been effusing about the sad decline of economically left-wing and socially conservative MPs from the patriotic working class. Now that one such has been elected, as that and as nothing else, then it is a national emergency to both frontbenches and to the entire official media. This was supposed to be written about through dewy eyes. It was never supposed to happen.

Still less was it supposed to happen in the person of the world's finest living political orator in the English language, fantastically well-informed, and phenomenally well-connected in every part of the country and on every continent, not least by having the political programme with the biggest weekly audience on the planet. If George is not that orator, then who is? If The Mother of All Talk Shows and its podcast do not have that audience, then what does? MPs and Lobby journalists who were not born when George was last in Parliament, are not going to know what has hit them when they hear him speak there. Take your patronising salt-of-the-earth and rub it in your wounds.

After the coordinated hysteria in response to the Rochdale byelection result, then no one could possibly doubt that centrism and right-wing populism were con tricks, designed to sell exactly the same economic and foreign policies to different audiences by pretending to wage a culture war. When centrism put up as itself and nothing else, in the now-forgotten form of Change UK, then it crashed and burned spectacularly, never electing anyone to anything. Right-wing populism puts up as itself and nothing else, with the result that Reform UK's elected representation consists of eight councillors, fewer than the number of members of many an Independent or Residents Group that exists on only one authority. I do not know how many of those eight were even elected as Reform UK. I doubt that it was all of them.

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. We have made a start.