Confidence?

From Neil Kinnock down, the entire Welsh Labour Establishment supported Vaughan Gething for Leader, and thus for First Minister. And while there may be worse than Torsten Bell, someone in Swansea West needs to ask what his duties were as Special Adviser to the late Alistair Darling as Chancellor of the Exchequer, since that Chancellorship ended when Bell was all of 27 years old. A Minister this time next month, apparently.

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 Keir Starmer would result in a hung Parliament.

I am standing for Parliament as an Independent here 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.