Gross Misconduct

As Officers need to be moved out of counterterrorism in order to try and clean up the Police, remember that Keir Starmer’s reaction to Baroness Casey and to Dame Rachel de Souza was instead to quote favourably from a 1975 speech by Margaret Thatcher, in which she vilified the Shrewsbury 24 and the Clay Cross Councillors, setting the scene for the policing of the Miners’ Strike, for the clubbing of pregnant women at the Battle of the Beanfield, for Hillsborough, and so on. It is scandalously downplaying the role of spycops against trade unions, and the role of the Government in blacklisting trade unionists, but the Undercover Policing Inquiry is making it clear that the likes of Starmer are unfit for public life.

Labour has reverted to type as the party for people who thought that the only problem with the wars, with the austerity programme, and with the authoritarian measures necessary to enforce them, was that they did not go far enough. Such people are not in the Conservative Party, because they dislike country house Tories and the private sector middle class. Labour is their device for harnessing the power of the State to lord it over everyone else.

But 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.