Holding On In There

Leasehold will not be abolished this year after all. Who has got at Michael Gove, and how? Try and explain leasehold to anyone from almost anywhere else in the world. Give three cheers for the three-term Labour Government that never abolished it.

And note carefully how feudalism has morphed into global capitalism, so that nostalgia for the former does not ultimately provide the basis necessary for resistance to the latter, as will be evident from Gove's star turn at this month's National Conservative conference. Leasehold should simply be abolished. People who wonder why I keep up the politics, no one else is saying things like this.

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.