Quite Complex Additional Problems?

Would you believe it, they agreed with us all along? If you do, then you shouldn't. Still, Labour's promise to implement the Cass Report, though wildly unlikely to be put into practice just as nor are the Conservatives going to do any such thing, will nevertheless put some people off voting Labour. They may go to the Liberal Democrats, who would make a play for them if they thought that it might work. But most of them will probably go to the Greens. Jolly good.

People who most certainly had not done so would also pretend to have agreed with us all along if Joe Biden really did drop the charges against Julian Assange. They are already doing so over a ceasefire in Gaza, but no one is buying that. Keir Starmer is the man alive who has done most to keep Assange behind bars, and now nothing could win back to his party the votes that it had lost over Gaza. Again, jolly good.

The greatest Labour pretence to have been on the right side of history relates to apartheid South Africa, which was supported by British Governments of both parties. Opposition was confined to the churches (although by no means always all the way down to the people in the pews, or even to a fairly sizeable section of the clergy), to a few extremely liberal upper-class Tories, to the Liberal Party, to the Labour Left, to the Communist Party, and to the Far Left. The last three had some influence in and through the trade unions and the student unions, but beyond that all six were politically marginal, to the point that not even the Lib-Lab Pact could change British policy towards South Africa. Three veterans of that struggle remain in the House of Commons, and none of them has the Labour whip.

All of that ended in my childhood, of course, and long before Jack Lubner was born. The present fashion for bemoaning "nepo babies" would suggest that nepotism had only recently arisen in showbusiness, in journalism, in academia, and in politics at least beyond the Conservative Party. How very, very, very young those complainants must be. And just as there is nothing either new, or necessarily wrong, about Labour dynasticism, by no means only on the Right, so there is nothing new about right-wing Labour grandees and their heirs whose money went back to apartheid South Africa. As an adult and in her own name, Margaret Hodge made a pile out of her family's interest in South African iron and steel in the 1970s and 1980s. In similar vein, Jim Murphy almost certainly wore the uniform and fired the gun of the South African Defence Force. These are not isolated examples.

Welcome to the Labour Party of the entirely typical Wilma Brown, whose sort has been subjecting me to far worse than that for decades. Welcome to the Labour Party that was exposed by the Forde Report, which did not surprise many of us in the least. Welcome to the Labour Party of Kim McGuinness. Since these things are not coincidental, welcome to the Labour Party whose panel on tax evasion and tax avoidance is to include both Hodge, who is herself a noted tax avoider, and Sir Edward Troup, who has stated that "taxation is legalised extortion" even while calling for more of it on pensioners, although presumably not on his 69-year-old self or on the 79-year-old Hodge.

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 of Britain, although nor would I expect to stand against it. If, however, it did not contest North Durham, then I would. Yesterday on Stanley Front Street, a group of teenage boys saluted "Mr Lindsay". It was not quite the teenage boy who once passed me on Lanchester Front Street, said "Mr Lindsay", curtsied, and walked on. But it was a start. I may have to contest the North Durham seat after all. The state of Stanley after 23 years of Kevan Jones does not make the case for four or five more, and no one has been arrested as a result of the Post Office scandal.

In any event, 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.