Settled Status?

Even if your definition of the Left included the Irish Labour Party, then the Irish Republic would still never have had a Left-led Government. Ever. There is nowhere where Proportional Representation means "permanent left-wing government", just as there is nowhere where it permanently "keeps out the Tories". The main argument of its opponents and of its proponents alike is balderdash.

As is the claim that First Past the Post either "guarantees stability" or "entrenches one-party rule". There have been three Prime Ministers well within the last year, there have been hung Parliaments as the direct result of two of the last four General Elections, and by far the most stable Government since 2010 has been the only formal Coalition since 1945. But First Past the Post is what we have, and the case for change has not been made.

If we are going to hold the line against allowing 16-year-olds to self-identify as the opposite sex, then we need to hold the line against allowing them to vote. I have always been uncharacteristically agnostic about that one, but while the usual arguments on both sides are rubbish, this changes the game. Intentionally or otherwise, the lowering of the voting age for devolved and municipal elections in Scotland set the scene for it, and must be reversed.

The quality of the elections varies widely, but a formal voting age of 18 is very nearly universal. Consider the huge difference in, say, drinking ages, or ages of marriage. Yet the world looks at the question of when to allow people to vote, and overwhelmingly it concludes that, while these things were always going to be arbitrary, 18 would do.

The only notable exception has been the election of two of the last three Prime Ministers of the United Kingdom, the two to have been elected by anyone. There is no minimum age to join the Conservative Party, and even if anyone were checking, then voting rights would officially kick in at the age of 15.

Like foreign nationals, overseas residents, and incarcerated convicts, 15-year-olds have officially, and younger children have no doubt unofficially, voted for two of the last three Prime Ministers, who have in each case taken office immediately upon having been declared elected Party Leader while Parliament was not even sitting. If you are going to let the very young exercise that kind of power, then why not let them do anything else at all?

We give the citizens of the Commonwealth's other member states the right to vote and stand in elections to our Parliament, but very few of those countries reciprocate; two of the last six Prime Ministers of Australia have had to give up their natal British citizenship in order to sit in the Australian Parliament.

The present system enfranchises Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, but not Americans or Israelis. Is that what those who write above the line in the Daily Telegraph want? It says that Ghanaians are more "like us" than Germans are, and that Swazis are more "like us" than Swedes are. Is that what those who write below the line in the Daily Mail want? 

Countries join and leave the Commonwealth quite frequently. None of them has any more recent connection to Britain that any member of the European Economic Area has. By any measure, many have less. Some fairly recent additions to the Commonwealth have no more connection to Britain than anywhere else in the world has. 

Although no less, either. Britain's superdiversity uniquely combines having people from every inhabited territory on earth, having some level of ethnic diversity down to every neighbourhood and village, and having a huge and exponentially increasing mixed-race population in the society that accepted mixed-race people and couples more than anywhere else.

Either parliamentary candidates should have to be British citizens in Great Britain, or British or Irish citizens in Northern Ireland, but there would be no nationality requirement for voting. Or there should simply be no nationality requirement either to vote or to stand. Either would do, but it does have to be one or the other. Instead, though, the European Union is overwhelmingly white, and it is only EU citizens whom it is proposed to enfranchise.

Beware of tying the franchise to the payment of income tax. 42 per cent of adults have incomes that do not reach that threshold. No, not "before benefits". Those are taxable income. Two in five adults have gross incomes, from all sources, of less of than one thousand pounds per month. If that does not sound like the Britain that you know, then you need to get out more. And if a Polish full-time cleaner could not vote because her income was too low for the taxman, then why should a British full-time cleaner be able to vote? So it would begin. So it is already beginning.

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.