Chain Reaction

I always did hope that Alex Watson was not going to tell me to vote for anyone against Jamie Driscoll for Mayor of the North East, because then I would have had a very difficult decision to make. But Labour was unlikely in the extreme to have allowed Jamie to be its candidate, and today it barred him. Alex is going to endorse someone, and the chances are vanishingly remote that that would not be good enough for me.

More broadly, though, while someone does have to be these things if they are there, directly elected mayors belong to the political cultures of presidential republics. We ought not to have them in Britain. And a quarter of a century of devolution has only ever further enriched and empowered the people who were already rich and powerful in the areas in question. Still, this is happening. Be on the bus, or be under it. Be at the table, or be on the menu.

There will be no referendum this time, but the Labour Party in County Durham is making exactly the arguments that I made 19 years ago against the regional assembly, sometimes against those very individuals. Hey, ho. Thankfully, we are heading for 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.