Food For Thought

No grown man is standing outside a pub smoking a bright pink, bubblegum-flavoured vape. Alcopops were deliberately designed both for children's price ranges and for children's palates. Here we are again.

But the State cannot intervene in these matters, can it? Look how brief was the period in which it looked as if the Government might act against food profiteering. In the process, it might have guaranteed the interests of its own party's core-of-the-core supporters.

Yet no. Toryism had to yield, as if the Conservative Party had the constitutional commitment to the "free" market that Labour had had since 1994, and which the Liberal Democrats had had since their foundation in 1988. No such commitment appears in the Conservative Party's constitution. It just behaves as if it did.

As important as holding the economic policy line, and of course inseparable from it, is holding the foreign policy line. Do that, and you can even be Nick Cohen. Would the Jewish Chronicle have employed anyone else who thought that kosher slaughter ought to be illegal?

Even David Aaronovitch is better, exposing the Kahanist roots of National Conservatism. The Thatcher Government banned Rabbi Meir Kahane from Britain, but now two members of Rishi Sunak's Cabinet pay court to his heirs, who also sit in the Israeli Cabinet. Therefore, is Aaronovitch a member of the Labour Party, since he would be liable to expulsion from it for this sort of thing?

Still, 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 Keir 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.