To Use The Jargon

Good old Laura Kuenssberg, on hand to tell us plebs that "North East Lincolnshire is a place", and that votes are counted "at tables, to use the jargon". Gawd bless you, I doffs me cap, so I do.

The Greens have gained councillors in Newcastle and in South Tyneside. Have their supporters also voted for the Green Mayoral candidate instead of Jamie Driscoll? The Greens ought to be out of the anti-austerity, anti-war and anti-racist movement if that has been decisive. If Kim McGuinness has won, then it has been because she put the 2019 General Election result on the frontpages of certain local newspapers as if it were an opinion poll result and claimed that only she could "beat the Tories". She would have won on a lie by paid journalists who were in fact cogs in the right-wing Labour machine. The 2028 campaign against her would start immediately.

Bound up with that, 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.