Best Fare Guarantee

If you believe that Keir Starmer would renationalise the railways, then you will believe absolutely anything. Even today's proposal is very unambitious, and Labour would never implement that. Still, a Government that has in fact taken certain franchises back into public ownership is being forced to decry the practice, and to predict strikes as if there none on its own watch. Such fun.

Next will be the British Rail sandwiches, which such defenders as there are of rail privatisation think is a killer blow. They also think that you have to have an adult memory of the 1970s, putting you in your early sixties as a bare minimum, to remember British Rail. You do not, and in any case most people who do, are in favour of renationalisation.

Around the twin poles of nuclear power and of the clean coal technology in which Britain was the world leader until the defeat of the Miners' Strike, let there be oil, gas, lithium, wind, solar, tidal, and everything else, bathing this country in heat and light. This is why we have a State.

And thanks to the all-of-the-above energy policy, let there be an all-of-the-above transport policy based around public transport free at the point of use, including publicly owned railways running on the electricity that public ownership would also supply to charging points in every neighbourhood and village. Astonishingly, and yet not, the fewest charging points for electric vehicles are in the areas that still stand on a thousand years' worth of coal. Let a thousand flowers bloom. In a well-tended garden.

The world's twenty-second highest population already has the sixth highest "defence" spending. It is time to spend some money on creating a country that anyone might consider worth defending. As a sovereign state with its own free-floating, fiat currency, the United Kingdom has as much of that currency as it chooses to issue to itself, with the fiscal and monetary means to control inflation, means that therefore need to be under democratic political control in both cases.

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.

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