Power Without Glory

It is decadent to want to take power in order to give it away. The purpose of taking power is to exercise it. In any case, Gordon Brown and Keir Starmer profess to want to give away power to subcultures that already have a lot of it and with several of which they themselves have close connections: to culturally Nationalist Scottish oligarchs and to Welsh-speaking Brahmins, to Ulster Protestant hard men and to the IRA, to county set Tories and to the right-wing Labour municipal machine. Those would even appoint the members of a new second chamber, and any dispute with the Commons would be resolved by a Supreme Court that was drawn entirely from Starmer's milieu.

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.