Supera Moras

How things survive. Today, Bolton Wanderers supporters chanted "You're just a town full of Tories" at Oxford United. The Conservative Party has two of the three MPs for Bolton, and 15 seats on the council. It holds neither parliamentary seat in Oxford, where there is not a single Conservative councillor.

While the Bolton situation may not last much longer, why do you want a Starmer Government? Not, "Why do you want rid of the Tories?" We all want that. But why do you want Keir Starmer? What for? His latest Six Whatsits do not mention workers' rights. He is not offering to taper carer's allowance. He accepts uncritically the totally false premise that there is widespread disability benefit fraud, or even any such. His support for the two-child benefit cap that mostly affected working families, and that with no cap on bankers' bonuses, would at least arguably make it preferable to vote for Suella Braverman than for a candidate who wanted Starmer to become Prime Minister. On democratic political control of monetary policy, Starmer has been outflanked on the left by Jacob Rees-Mogg. If you ever did believe that Starmer had a 30-point lead, then you have to believe that he halved it in a week, so why are you not calling on him to resign?

If the Official Opposition were calling for the water companies to be fined into bankruptcy or allowed to go bust, before being renationalised for nothing, then something like that would be Government policy. If the Official Opposition were calling for the recognition of Palestine, in line with the huge majority of the world, and for an end to arms sales to Israel, in line with the huge majority of public opinion, then the public school Arabist, internationally realist, and electorally canny instincts of David Cameron and Andrew Mitchell would have brought about both.

As it is, we continue to supply arms to Israel even though they have been used to murder three British aid workers. Here as in so many other cases, if Britain has a "robust" system of licensing arms exports, then what in the world would a lax one look like? The IDF can take out exactly the right individuals inside the Iranian Embassy in Damascus, so it does not make mistakes. The targeted killing of aid workers is necessary to give effect to Starmer's advice that Gaza's population, three quarters of it women and children, be starved as a weapon of war.

Despite being far older than Tony Blair was in 1997, Starmer even tries to look like him at the time of that General Election. But how many votes would Blair get now? In those days, Labour revelled both in its Leader's personal popularity and in its own enormous membership, but these days it has to pretend to be indifferent to the fact that its Leader was if anything actively disliked, while it positively wants to have no one in it apart from people who were one way or another paid to be there, people who were desperate to be on that teat, and people who were too old to find a new hobby. That dream has been realised. Jeremy Corbyn was screamed at as a tramp and what have you, but he was a model of sartorial elegance compared to Starmer's scruffiness. Does Starmer propose to present himself on the world stage like that, as the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom?

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. 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.