Neither Business Nor Class

While it is great fun, and entirely correct, to mock Rachel Reeves as the Queen of Sheba, the real story is that Keir Starmer inherited a huge, and healthily solvent, Labour Party, which he has turned into a shrunken rump on the brink of bankruptcy. Things are being kept ticking over by corporate donations to individual frontbenchers.

That is why Reeves is Shadow Chancellor at all. That is why Wes Streeting is Shadow Health Secretary. That is why Labour is to the right of 65 to 70 per cent of Conservative voters in its opposition to the renationalisation of the utilities and of the railways. And that is why Streeting is faithful to the spirit of Tony Blair, of Alan Milburn and of Paul Corrigan, in calling for the privatisation of the National Health Service while insulting its staff and while attacking its very principle.

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 I say again that on the day that Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister, I predicted that a General Election between him and 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.