Still Time To Shut The Stable Door

If you have half a mind to vote for Kim McGuinness, then you have half a mind more than Kim McGuinness. You can understand anyone by picturing them at 18. She does not want to be Mare McGuinness for nothing. Do you want to be ruled from the show ponies' stable that is the mean girls' table? Vote for Jamie Driscoll.

McGuinness embodies perfectly the fact that 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. Vote for Jamie Driscoll.

As an expression of its defining spite and bitterness, Labour has today abandoned workers' rights pretty much completely. No, of course Angela Rayner has not resigned. Only the unions give money to a political party to be abused. Every other penny that is invested in any of them, including Labour, buys something specific. And that is what those payments are. Entirely legitimate investments. They are not donations, because a political party is most certainly not a charity. Most unions have never been affiliated to the Labour Party. The ones that are, are led by people whose sentimentality about it is a never-ending source of frustration to some of us. "You have to forgive your family anything" is all very well, but it has nothing to do with politics. If Unite were still affiliated to the Labour Party in 2026, and if no one with a higher profile had stepped up to the plate, then I would be a candidate for General Secretary, in support of an all-of-the-above energy policy with an all-of-the-above transport policy, and to secure disaffiliation both from the Labour Party and from the ILGA. Join Unite Community here. And vote for Jamie Driscoll.

In the meantime, 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 Keir 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. 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.