Real Reform UK

In the midst of the cost of living crisis, the supermarkets could have put up wages. They could even have cut prices and still have been highly profitable. Instead, their profits have gone through the roof, while the Government promises to imprison shoplifters but not Michelle Mone.

Or Michelle Donelan, who has taken us all for £34,000, more than twice what had originally been admitted, for libellously having called Professor Kate Sang a Hamas supporter. Indeed, put it all together, and between the Government, and UK Research and Innovation, which it funds, the cost has been £61,460, just over four times the original figure. So far. Who would rule out further upward revision?

A Hamas supporter. Of course. Israel's ability to kill specific Iranians in Damascus, or the relatives of specific Hamas officials in Gaza, should be remembered whenever it claimed to have accidentally killed anyone, including British aid workers. "Israel has the right to self-defence," but Iran, whose territory has been bombed in the form of its consulate, killing seven of its citizens, apparently does not. By what treaty would either the United Kingdom or the United States be obliged to defend Israel from the consequences of that attack?

How would we even do it? The sixth highest "defence" spending the world has given Britain all of 40 operational tanks. If Iran is to be the third front after Russia and China, which have barely heard of us and if anything think that we live the lives that we choose to sell to the world in costume dramas, then that would be 13 tanks per front, with one spare. The Revolutionary Guard Corps quakes in its boots.

Meanwhile, someone who pays a lot to politicians is being paid a hell of a lot by all of us. File alongside HS2, PPE, Test and Trace, the Bibby Stockholm, the impending bailout of Thames Water, and Rwanda, which has taken absolutely nobody, having always said that it would take only 100 people per year, and having now sold even most of that housing estate to local buyers.

Wes Streeting would do the same thing to England's NHS. He was at it again today about "spare capacity" in the private sector, and he would never come out with that if he knew that there was no such thing, because it was the same doctors. If he knew that, then he would know that so did you, so he would not dare try that one. This ignoramus wants to be the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care.

And under whom? David Smith may have apologised to Seema Misra, but it was not the Post Office that prosecuted her, sending her to prison while pregnant, prison with Rose West. Keir Starmer lobbied successfully to make it easier for himself, and only the Director of Public Prosecutions in person, to halt a private prosecution. He never took over any Post Office private prosecution and halted it, but he took over several of the Post Office's private prosecutions and turned them into public prosecutions. This was one such. Why does Kevan Jones want Starmer to become Prime Minister?

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. From the coming steelworkers' strike for any meaningful British sovereignty, to the dawning realisation even by the liberal bourgeoisie that falling birth rates were a disaster as much for their own institutional base as for everything else, via the recognition from the first that the case for assisted suicide was the Matthew Parris case that had to be resisted without compromise, the Workers Party is the electoral vehicle of the tradition that is animating a range of emerging initiatives, including my magazine and my thinktank.

Nick Fletcher's unpunished endorsement of Lee Anderson confirms that the Conservatives and Reform UK are not really separate parties, much less rivals. As a limited company, Reform was always going to stand aside in as many seats as the Conservatives directly or indirectly paid it to, and that day is fast approaching. Centrism and right-wing populism are con tricks to sell exactly the same economic and foreign policies to different audiences by pretending to wage a culture war. By contrast, the Workers Party, with an MP elected under its banner, is going to contest hundreds of seats, and quite possibly more than half. At least in the latter event, the televised debates ought not to go ahead without that party. At the very least, they ought not to do so while featuring any party that was fielding fewer candidates.

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.