Fruit Pickers?

Extinction Rebellion seems to have provided a high proportion of the attendees at the National Conservatism conference. It is anyone's guess why they feel the need to protest against past and present members of this Net Zero Government. That is as baffling as Just Stop Oil's demonstration against the King.

As well as questioning Net Zero despite having been in the Cabinet when it was adopted, Jacob Rees-Mogg has today criticised voter ID. He is right. But he was there. Suella Braverman still is there, directly responsible for immigration. On the need to train our own people, then she, too, is right. She should take it up with the Home Secretary.

And Danny Kruger passed from the conventional Thatcherism of the Centre for Policy Studies, through being Chief Speechwriter to David Cameron, to being Political Secretary to Boris Johnson, who was the first of, so far, three Prime Ministers of Stonewall, of the lockdowns, of the Northern Ireland Protocol, and of the Net Zero that Johnson said that Britain had pioneered by destroying its coal industry. Are Kruger and Rees-Mogg now saying that the miners were right and Margaret Thatcher was wrong? If Kruger believed a word of his effusions about family life, then he would have to say that. He is never going to say it. Stay tuned for Michael Gove, who has been a Cabinet Minister almost continuously since 2010, and who is the father of the present state-funded education system in England.

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.