Paying Homage?

Oh, to have seen Earl Spencer pay the Homage of Peers. But if that is what the Homage of the People is to replace, then what makes anyone assume that the People will necessarily take it any more seriously than the Peers very often have? We are to be given plenty of cause not to.

For example, the Crown, which is the State, brings the prosecution, so Ministers of the Crown always have a target conviction rate of 100 per cent. But that is why guilt and innocence are not determined by single, salaried employees of the State. Again I ask what practitioners in other Roman law jurisdictions make, or would make, of the Victims, Witnesses and Justice Reform (Scotland) Bill, and which other countries would extradite to such a regime.

Any firm of criminal defence solicitors that accepted instruction in a trial pursuant to that legislation would be accepting the principle of rigging the process so as to make acquittal practically impossible. Who would want to be defended by someone like that? Yet simply by having delivered a drastic increase in the conviction rate, this measure will be declared a success, leading any neo-Blairite, or National Conservative, Government to introduce it throughout the United Kingdom. Alba could never call for any section 35 order without disappearing up its own fundamental principles, but there are four Liberal Democrat MPs for constituencies in Scotland.

Then there is the "bonfire" of EU legislation. The EU never did deliver workers' rights, or Barbara Castle and Tony Benn would have loved it, and we on the Red Wall would have voted Remain if there had ever been a referendum at all. But the Brexit that our votes shook the money markets by delivering is being used as an excuse to dismantle even what paltry protections had ever been enacted within the constraints of Margaret Thatcher's Single Market and of the Customs Union. The opposite ought to be the case.

This is all in the midst of the extension of the decades-long cost of living crisis to people who used to say that its victims just needed to budget properly; it goes back a very long way before Brexit, or Covid-19, or the war in Ukraine. No trade union worthy of the name would recommend a real terms pay cut, and no trade unionist worthy of the name would vote to accept one. If workers' pay were what was causing inflation, then that would not even be a point of discussion. It is, though, because all that we are being offered instead is Keir Starmer.

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 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.