Siding With The British People?

I do not know which educational institution's tie our 42-year-old Prime Minister remains so fond of wearing, but it never taught him not to call pickets "picketers". I had never even heard "picketers" until today. It may be American, but I do not know. No one expects a Conservative Prime Minister to know much about trade unionism, but he ought to know enough to avoid attracting outright ridicule. The same is true when Government Ministers, the BBC, and indeed right-wing Labour MPs, now refer to putting a pay offer to "a referendum". It is called a ballot, and no one, no one at all, ever used to make that mistake.

As for Keir Starmer, his favourable quotation of George Osborne said it all. The good abolition of non-domiciled status, the mediocre windfall tax, and the bad imposition of VAT on private school fees, are supposed to pay for everything. That proves that neither any of them, nor any of the measures that they were supposed to fund, would ever be attempted. Having said that, Rishi Sunak's vast, and largely foreign, wealth has always stood between him and the small overall majority that he would otherwise have been able to win against Starmer.

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 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.