At Stake, Diane

The local election results this month presaged a hung Parliament, so the super-Establishment YouGov pulled a 30-point Labour lead out of somewhere or other and put in the super-Establishment Times. If you ever believed that lead, then it had more than halved to 12, so the same YouGov tells us that that in turn has more than doubled in one day. In-the-loopers, you are desperate for Keir Starmer, an apparently computer-generated securocrat who has been in electoral politics only since he was 52, to become Prime Minister. But we are not.

Diane Abbott is the object of such obsession on the part of Britain's racists that her very name is banned from the comments section of Guido Fawkes even under posts about her. Poor old Paul Staines cannot take the risk. Starmer is signalling to the people like that, that Labour is now the party for them. Has there been any word on Abbott from the scourges of the abuse of women, such as Jess Phillips, who made her name by falsely claiming to have abused Abbott? Or from Hope Not Hate? The real anti-racist movement despises that astroturfing operation, but it is so naïve as to be charming in small doses. Unlawfully as a registered charity, it is leafleting Rochdale to try to defeat George Galloway for opposing the war on Gaza and for believing that women could not have penises. The same leaflet. Who is supposed to be its target audience?

Starmer's goons are putting it about that Abbott's momentary difficulty with a gotcha question several years ago still came up on their fictional "doorstep". Yet Boris Johnson was First Lord of the Treasury, with Rishi Sunak as his Second Lord, while not knowing how percentages or probabilities worked. Johnson and his clique were vomiting up the walls of a Downing Street in lockdown in the full knowledge of the silent Labour Party Press Office that had previously made the "story" of Abbott and her mojito the news for a week.

We shall see who embodied the failures of the past when Abbott, Galloway, Claudia Webbe and Jeremy Corbyn were in the next Parliament while Phillips, Wes Streeting, Angela Rayner, Thangam Debbonaire and Shabana Mahmood had lost their seats. If Abbott were to stand again for Labour, then Starmer would be admitting that anything else would have cost it enough seats to have denied it an overall majority. If she were not, then he would be saying that his majority was bound to be so enormous that we pickaninnies could do as Phillips falsely claimed to have advised Abbott.

Nigel Farage has today told Harry Cole that he was open to a deal with the Conservative Party, and Cole has stated without correction that that meant that Reform UK would not contest every seat. But we all knew that, anyway. Reform is a limited company, so its directors will have a fiduciary duty to take whatever the Conservative donors offered them to stand down its candidates in Conservative seats. And a fiduciary duty to whom? Reform's majority shareholder is Farage.

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 Starmer would result in a hung Parliament.

The Workers Party of Britain is not contesting North Durham, so I am. Please contact davidaslindsay@hotmail.com, including if you might be able to help with, not to put too fine a point on it, money. But I will be on that ballot paper, come what may. At the time of writing, there is no Labour, Conservative, or Liberal Democrat candidate at North Durham. 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.