No Allowance

"Think you're posh, do you, Tory Boys? Well, I've got my own special tax law, complete with my name in the title of it." 

In Stoke today, so in the Midlands, Keir Starmer quoted favourably from the law and order section of Margaret Thatcher's 1975 Conservative Party Conference speech, which condemned the Shrewsbury 24, who have since been exonerated after a very long fight, and the Clay Cross Councillors, who had refused to put up rents on social housing. The immediately following passage heaped praise on the Army for Bloody Sunday.

Most people think that Starmer should have been fined for the party at Durham Miners' Hall, where I can assure you that he would not be welcome now, while most of the rest think that he was. And there is a long time yet until the next General Election.

When I tell you that there is going to be a hung Parliament, then you can take that to the bank. I spent the 2005 Parliament saying that it was psephologically impossible for the Heir to Blair's Conservative Party to win an overall majority. I predicted a hung Parliament on the day that the 2017 General Election was called, and I stuck to that, entirely alone, all the way up to the publication of the exit poll eight long weeks later. And on the day that Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister, I predicted that a General Election between him and Starmer would result in 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.