Storm Shadow

You mean that the Wagner Group was not already designated a terrorist organisation? Get out of that one. And explain why you were now siding with the Russian military establishment. We have no side between Wagner and Svoboda, Pravy Sektor, the National Corps, C14, the Azov Battalion, the Aidar Battalion, the Donbas Battalion, the Dnipro-1 Battalion, the Dnipro-2 Battalion, the Kraken Regiment, or any of the rest of those. Ban them all. After all, there is already a man with Azov Battalion connections in prison in Britain as a terrorist.

Yet instead, having already supplied Ukraine with the weapon of mass destruction that is depleted uranium, we are now open about supplying it with long-range, air-launched Storm Shadow cruise missiles, capable of striking deep inside Russia. The United States may or may not be telling the truth when it strenuously refuses to send those projectiles to Ukraine, but that is the official American line. Yet Ben Wallace, a man who dared not turn up to the Oxford Union for fear of George Galloway, announces that Vladimir Putin will, "beg me for mercy." He won't, you know, Benny Boy. He really, really, really won't.

Not that such questions are being asked on the floor of the House of Commons. 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.