Little Local Difficulties?

Since October, Labour's poll lead has fallen from 37 per cent to seven per cent. The party has just taken fewer votes than it did for the same seats in 2019, under Jeremy Corbyn. Its projected national share is in single figures, which is not enough for an overall majority, and there is still a year and a half to go. The Liberal Democrats have done about as well as Labour, and in places that mattered to the Conservatives. The Green Party has been stunningly successful. People expelled from the Labour Party have romped home against its official candidates, with the best-known, Councillor Alan Gibbons of Liverpool City Council, taking 77 per cent of the vote, and 1,428 votes to Labour's 360.

So now, they are all catching up. I predicted both hung Parliaments this century, and I predicted another one on the day that Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister. 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 I say again that 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.