Jolly Voting Weather

10,825 is Labour's lowest number of votes at Blackpool South in 40 years, including when Labour has lost the seat. That pattern was evident at numerous elections yesterday. There is no head of steam for Labour. It is just that Conservatives are staying at home. 

Yes, Labour won the new Mayoralty in the East Midlands, where it served Ben Bradley right for dressing like a teenager. When my generation was laughing at Tim Westwood, then he was about the age that Bradley is now. But Labour did so badly in Tees Valley that Ben Houchen was able to be re-elected on the premise that being a crook was precisely his charm.

A projected national share of 34 per cent is pitiful when the opinion polls claim that Labour is on 47 per cent. Ed Miliband did better than 34 per cent both in 2012 and 2013, and Jeremy Corbyn did so in 2018, when calls for his resignation were then screeched from the rooftops.

Between them, the Liberal Democrats, the Greens, the Workers Party of Britain, and Independents have gained more seats than Labour. Any one of them has gained more than Reform UK, which has picked up all of two. If only from my Facebook friends list, I had already known that the Independent Left had far more than Reform's then 10 councillors, and it has made big gains on top of that, with more councillors elected specifically for the Workers Party than for the party the media indulgence of which demonstrated that centrism and right-wing populism were con tricks to sell exactly the same economic and foreign policies to different audiences by pretending to wage a culture war.

Reform is not even any good at making that sale. It wins almost nothing. It expects, and absurdly receives, a very British round of applause for being plucky when it comes third or below, in fact purely for turning up. One of its television stations has gone online-only, while the other teeters on the brink of bankruptcy. The Government had to be begged to change the law to stop its newspapers and its magazine from being bought by the only people who wanted to buy them, meaning that they, too, may not exist in a year's time. What could save them? Nationalisation? If anyone deserves a Freeview station and a state-protected spot in the national print media, then it is the Workers Party and its Independent Left allies, trading as such for local reasons as more-or-less Tory Independents have done since time immemorial.

That those are the people with anything distinctive to say has been recognised by whoever staged a hit-and-run attack on a female Workers Party activist in Ashton-under-Lyne on polling day. Sky News predicts that Labour will be only the largest party in a hung Parliament. That would have happened in 2022 if Keir Starmer had not announced a second referendum policy in order to bring on the 2019 General Election and thus bring down Corbyn.

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. But if 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. But there does need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not. We have made a start.