Let's Go Postal

Good riddance to Simon Thompson. Strikes work. But he has made off with a salary of £525,000, and £290,000 in lieu of notice, plus a very golden goodbye of £675,000. As near as makes no difference to one and a half million pounds. For being sacked.

The Royal Mail was sold for one billion pounds less than its true value. It is time for renationalisation. And it is time for a criminal investigation into the larceny that pretty much gave it away to the likes of George Osborne's best man, in a signpost to the future of Dido Harding, Michelle Mone, and Matt Hancock's pub landlord.

It has since come to be owned largely by the Emir of Kuwait, to whom the "Royal" in its name presumably now refers. But it is our own King who should refuse to have his image and the Royal Cypher on any more stamps or postboxes at least until that investigation had been initiated.

The Coalition privatised the Royal Mail, and since Labour's ever-starstruck National Blathering Shop has done what Tony Blair set it up to do and rubberstamped a buttock-numbing list of vacuous policies to order, the ones about the Royal Mail make no mention of its screamingly necessary and massively popular return to public ownership. The Communication Workers Union pays for this.

In fact, there is nothing even on that list that a Starmer or Streeting Government would do. Apart from the extension of the state-backed power of middle-class women over everyone else. And left only to themselves or to each other, then that would be exactly what the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats or the Scottish Nationalist would also do. The Conservatives and the SNP are already doing it. "Introduce specialist rape courts to fast-track cases," indeed.

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.