One In, All In

606,000, including 88,000 British nationals. So 518,000. One one-hundred-and-thirty-sixth of the population. What a deluge. Rishi Sunak is still refusing to set even the vaguest target for net migration, meaning that there is none. Britain is the only country with a formal government policy of unlimited immigration. We are fully in control of our borders, and this is what we choose to do with that control.

Why would any Conservative Leader take a different view? Labour does not know where to begin on immigration, but far more people are swinging between the Conservatives and either the Liberal Democrats or the Greens than would consider voting for anything expressly to the Conservatives' right. What matters is to ensure that everyone is in the union, and that it does what it is supposed to do. If it had still been a matter of "no union card, no job", then none of this would ever have been possible. But here we are.

As for the franchise, Britain has always been odd in allowing any non-citizens to vote. The point was conceded a very long time ago. One could hardly take the vote away from the Prime Minister's wife. One could hardly take the vote away from anyone. This is not 1832, when the vote was taken away from women. Require parliamentary candidates to be British citizens in Great Britain, or British or Irish citizens in Northern Ireland. But let everyone vote. We already enfranchise the Commonwealth citizens of Rwanda, Mozambique, Gabon and Togo, none of which was ever in the British Empire. Why let a Gabonese or a Togolese vote, but not an American or an Israeli?

They get shouty about immigration at London conferences of visiting Americans and Israelis who fancied Britain as their laboratory, as the International Right always does. They pretend to care about it in the pages that were produced by certain highly international newsrooms, not all of them British-owned. But the latter will hold the line only as long as their advertisers wanted them to, which will not be very much longer at all. The same people bankroll the Conservative Party, and they are getting what they pay for, because they always do. If you really wanted Britain to have more religion in general or more Christianity in particular, then you would want vastly more immigration.

Still, this was Suella Braverman's chosen ground, so, as two of the last three Home Secretaries, she should be sacked. Again. Someone has to prevent the Home Secretaryship from falling into the hands of Yvette Copper, the Wicked Witch of the Work Capability Assessment, who has already murdered hundreds of thousands of people before she had control of Police who could not now be criminally liable for anything.

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.