Absolutely Shameless

The swing to Labour at Stretford and Urmston would not translate into an overall majority. In December 2019, Labour held the seat with 30,195 votes. In December 2022, it has done so with 12,828 votes. Labour's majority is six thousand fewer than the number of votes that it has lost. As always under Keir Starmer, the Labour vote has collapsed. At 25.8 per cent, the turnout was only half the threshold for industrial action in a trade union ballot.

The Guardian may have a nerve, but even without mentioning its own extensive role in the same project, it is of course perfectly correct that Jeremy Corbyn called the BBC's bluff on being prepared to pay more tax for a fairer society, both on the willingness to pay, and on the precise definition of such a society. Scared out of its wits by the 2017 result, when Labour would have been the largest party if it had not been for organised sabotage by the party's staff, the BBC set out to destroy Corbyn. Not that he always helped himself, but nadir was reached in the infamous Panorama that not even The Guardian still attempts to defend, remarking only that the BBC itself and Ofcom could see nothing wrong with it, and leaving the matter there. Quite.

Those who point to Ken Loach's own political history have all welcomed Christian Wakeford with open arms, and either they were Change UK's supporters, members and donors, or they are the sort of people to whom the Labour Party is an end in itself. They have no professional or social lives apart from it, nor can they conceive of such a thing. They would be virgins if it were not for "The Party", and they think that so would everyone else. We are back to the Labour Party's past and present members of staff. No one in Britain is in any position to bemoan the lack of coverage of the Twitter files unless they say the same about The Labour Files and the Forde Report. Or vice versa.

As is obvious from the result at Stretford and Urmston, we are heading for a hung Parliament. 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.