Better Than Nothing

My MP is Luke Akehurst. Like me, he is disabled. I therefore trust that he is doing everything possible to save the two pound buses that were introduced by my then MP, Richard Holden.

After all, there are small signs of hope. The Independent Alliance was convened yesterday, and David Lammy duly announced the end of eight per cent of Britain's licences for arms exports to Israel. Not much, but still something. And next week, there is to be a Commons vote on the winter fuel payment. There will end up being another of these compromises. Again, nowhere near sufficient. But again, a defeat for the people who had held the original line until the very last moment.

Now for something on the two-child benefit cap. Then all three points would have been conceded in principle. Not bad for five MPs, one in 130, who had never met until they had all shown up on the first day of this Parliament, and who had come from widely different political backgrounds: two nonpartisan community activists, an ex-Labour one whose campaign manager had done the same job for Jack Straw in 2005, a Liberal Democrat councillor until this May who had once been a portfolio holder in a coalition with the Conservatives, and Jeremy Corbyn. We are the broad-based mainstream. We are the centre.

Another of the Government's half-hearted compromises, but which were still better than nothing and which conceded the points, is the Passenger Railway Services (Public Ownership) Bill, on which there were three divisions this evening. There was no sign of Jas Athwal on the Division Lists. If he still had the Labour whip in a week's time, then other MPs should resign it. None of them will. But they should.