From My Cold, Dead Hands

Like most British people, I find the gun culture of the United States incomprehensible, and profoundly unattractive. But if I had one, which I do not, then I would never surrender any firearm of mine either to Donald Trump or to Joe Biden.

Prince Harry's bragging about his 25 kills in Afghanistan was too much even for Richard Kemp, meaning that he really had gone too far, but it was of a piece with the American liberalism into which he had married.

Liberal America is still the land of guns in homes, of guns sold in supermarkets, of armed Police, of capital punishment, and of popular humour about a level of casual violence in schools that would not be tolerated in prisons in Britain. Huge numbers of Americans have been in their country's ultra-violent penal system, or in the military that implemented its highly interventionist foreign policy, or both. For all its good points, and I do not deny them, America is a violent place, and it is no wonder that Harry feels at home there.

Seeking to extend across the whole wide Earth the mission that had extended the Republic from sea to shining sea, American liberalism has been possibly the world's most bellicose political movement in living memory. It has given us Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Korea and Vietnam, and every act of the Clintons, of the Obama Administration, and of the 50 years and counting since Mr Biden went to Washington.

Its domestic record has been no better in almost as long, with obscenities such as the repeal of Glass-Steagall, and the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 that Biden sponsored on behalf of Bill Clinton, setting the tone for little brother copycatting by the Blair Government and by any future Starmer Government, which now proposes to have victims determine sentences. Even Kamala Harris would have to eat her heart out at that one.

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 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.