Revised Mandate

Although almost all of it was supported by the Official Opposition and still is, the mini-Budget never did become law, yet look how much it is going to be costing us for decades to come. See also the assorted frauds and fiddles around PPE, supported by Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the SNP. And see the ever-spiralling cost of our insistence on involving ourselves in the war in Ukraine, likewise. We could perfectly easily afford to settle all of the strikes tonight. Against that background, then the initial cost would hardly register. In the long, medium and even short term, the benefits would be vast.

If it falls to the Secretary of State for Transport to permit the rail operators to make a new offer to the unions, then why are those operators in the private sector, and indeed in what sense are they? Those companies' business model, if it can be so described, is to charge the State whatever they felt like, to provide something so important that the Government wished to subject it to minimum service levels.

How can something like that be owned even by British private companies, never mind by foreign private companies and by foreign states? So much for national sovereignty and national security. Being wholly dependent on public subsidy as their starting point, how much are the rail operators really worth? The value of their stock, but some of them do not even own that, and instead rent it from those which do. Yet half of your exorbitant rail fare is profit. Renationalisation. Now.

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.