Compass Points

Neal Lawson committed an obviously expulsionable act, so the story here is that it took the Labour Party two years to get round to kicking him out. It moves rather more quickly against other people, and it did so on numerous occasions during that period. Keir Starmer has hitherto protected what used to be called the Soft Left. But he has clearly gone to war with it now.

Meanwhile, the Change UK lot have been welcomed back with open arms, although it is still only three and a half years since they stood against Labour under assorted banners at a General Election. Starmer has been endorsed by at least one defector to that from the Conservative Party, who then contested a Conservative-Labour marginal seat that the Conservatives went on to hold. She attended Theresa May's Cabinet. Lawson's politics may not be mine, but they are a whole lot better than Anna Soubry's. Starmer wants to create 100 Peers to staff his Government. Think on.

Electoral pacts are wrong in principle, because votes belong to voters, not to parties. And Proportional Representation, a generic term for any electoral system that is not First Past the Post, is one of those issues on which both sides' arguments are rubbish, so the case for change has not been made. Where, exactly, does it keep the Right out of office? Even if you count the Irish Labour Party, then no party remotely of the Left has ever led an Irish Government. That is the supposed Holy Grail of the Single Transferable Vote. Every Taoiseach, ever, has been either the Leader of Fianna Fáil, or the Leader of Fine Gael.

Two of the last four British General Elections have delivered hung Parliaments, and in both cases the Leader of the Conservative Party has either become or remained Prime Minister. In 2017, the Liberal Democrats had the same number of seats as the DUP, so I am not convinced that a system that always delivered hung Parliaments would keep the Lib Dems in office. But in any case, who would want that? The Coalition was by far the most stable Government since 2010, and it delivered the austerity programme and the war in Libya. The Hard Right ought to be the leading agitators for permanent Cabinet seats for the Lib Dems. The rest of us ought not to want a hung Parliament either to bring them back for one Parliament, or, as did not happen last time, to change the electoral system on the highly questionable assumption that that would bring them back in perpetuity.

Rather, we should accept the fact that there is going to be one, and prepare to make it work for us. 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.