Whistling Dog

As with Nicola Sturgeon, merely stating the obvious does not make Yvette Cooper anything less than a monster. Cooper claimed benefits when she was unable to work due to ME. Years later, she introduced the Work Capability Assessment. I have met some of the people with ME who were among the huge numbers of seriously ill and disabled people who were thus denied benefits, including benefits that they had already been receiving. In the midst of that, Cooper and Ed Balls flipped their home three times during the expenses scandal.

On this morning's Today programme, Cooper did not object to Nick Robinson's description of the missing refugee children as having "want[ed] to be trafficked" and, as if it had mattered, as "mostly Albanians". Later, on Good Morning Britain, she was unable to say to Adil Ray's face why she thought that refugees from Ukraine should be treated so much more favourably than refugees from Afghanistan, instead dog-whistling about how Ukrainians "wanted to go home" while Afghans did not, about how Ukraine was "a European country", and about "people in my constituency". Thankfully, her majority there has gone through the floor. One more heave.

Otherwise, she thinks that she is going to be Home Secretary. But 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.