Capacity

Private healthcare does not have "spare capacity". It does not have doctors and nurses standing about, doing nothing. Like private anything, it is demand-led. Wes Streeting proposes to create vast additional demand at public expense. If private hospitals are so cash-strapped as to need that, then it would be far cheaper for the National Health Service to buy them. Privatisation means water rationing this summer, weeks after the present floods and soon after the wettest 18 months ever recorded even in Britain. Do you want that for the NHS?

Such common sense reappeared in frontline politics in 2015, so it had to be delegitimised before it could damage the profits of the people who bankrolled all other factions. "Labour anti-Semitism" was a hoax that in any case could not now be pulled after the Israeli murder of three British aid workers, military veterans whose faces matched their WASP names. Starving the people of Gaza as a weapon of war, as advocated by Keir Starmer, necessitates the bombing of aid convoys. David Cameron is a much better Foreign Secretary than he was a Prime Minister, and thankfully he keeps his present office out of the hands of David Lammy. But even after that triple murder using a British-made weapon, not even Cameron can suspend the sale of arms to Israel, something that both Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair did.

That would be to break the spell. Perhaps the use of democratic political control to pursue economic equality deserved the enormous popularity of its specific policy implications, rather than being subject to an absolute taboo as the condition of being allowed a hearing? And where would that all end? That boy whose daddy, a veteran of P. W. Botha's Police Force, has just bought him the chair of Young Labour and will buy him a Commons seat soon enough, was only 13 when Jeremy Corbyn became Leader, yet he has won on the back of recounting experiences that were never found by the Equality and Human Rights Commission. Gen Z are getting as bad as the Boomers for "I was there". They will soon be remembering things from before they were born, as Boomers do about the War.

Here's one for Jack Lubner. Tell us your specifically left-wing opinion on anything, such as differentiates you from the Conservative Party. Tell us the public policy your advocacy of which would presently preclude you from Ministerial office. The same goes for Streeting, for Starmer, for Lammy, for Rachel Reeves, for any of them. If they can think of an answer, then it is either their desire to privatise the NHS as more than an aspiration, or their belief that support for Israel should be unconditional, although Cameron has not specified his conditions.

Labour is a party of extremely right-wing people who lack the social connections to make it in the Conservative Party, and whose two defining experiences were being brought up to spit on everyone below them, which was everyone else where they grew up, and discovering in their first 36 hours at university that they were nowhere near the top of the class system, a discovery that embittered them for life.

Demonstrating at Starmer's home was a bit much, but Corbyn's was besieged throughout his Leadership, and it sometimes still is. Pointing out the Far Right links of the campaigners against grooming gangs was branded a slur by the same newspapers that now deploy it against Billy Howarth's accession to the Workers Party of Britain. In fact, the spooky Far Right was somewhere to put the white working class in order to ignore it most of the time and demonise it when necessary. But now it has somewhere else to go, so all the fires of Hell have to be rained down on those who have gone there instead. Expect the same treatment of people who made their way to and in the Workers Party from communities and campaigns that had previously been contained by being associated with Islamism, which is also riddled with spooks.

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.

I have no plan to join the Workers Party, 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.