Strong Enough

Has David Lammy resigned as Shadow Foreign Secretary? If not, why not? He described Leave voters as Nazis and white supremacists, before apologising for having used language that was "not strong enough". How can he continue to serve under Keir Starmer after this?

If anyone believed Starmer, then they would be reconstituting Change UK. In reality, being pro-EU in Britain is like being pro-NATO in Ireland, the mark of being in the club. And Starmer is nothing if not that. Like Irish membership of NATO, British membership of the EU looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck.

Irish influence in American political and military circles is such that the suggestion that Ireland had no say over NATO would be splitting hairs, if that, while British elite influence within the EU institutions prior to formal Brexit makes it not quite true that we were now obeying the rules while having no say over them. Unless everyone in the place has deleted all of those people's numbers, then, while there is less British involvement than there used to be, there is not none.

Britain remains one of the largest economies that adhered to EU legislation, so of course there are channels across the Channel. That is not your influence or mine, but it never was. That was why we voted Leave, just as that was why they voted Remain, although the result made very little difference to them, as voting rarely or never does. They have other powers at their disposal.

Still, formal Brexit has embarrassed them, so they are going to reverse it. They know their trump card. "You have no one in the room," they can say to us, although they can never say that of themselves. On immigration, they have two arguments, depending on the audience. One is, "It has gone up, anyway." The other is, "The Stay Outers are still fighting a battle from 2016. Take out Don't Knows, and of those who express an opinion, the majority now thinks, either that immigration is at the right level, or that it is too low." Oh, and Nigel Farage has said on television that, "Brexit has failed." How do we get out of that one?

Even if the pension age had gone up to a mere 68, the age at which my father died, then in a dozen years' time come September, I would still be 10 years away from retirement. But Britain will already be back in the EU. Not just Margaret Thatcher's Single Market and the Customs Union, but the eurozone and the Schengen Area. No referendum. A handful of votes against in the Commons. No division in the Lords. Royal Assent with one of those occasional Buckingham Palace statements which explicitly welcomed a political development. Thoroughly celebratory television coverage, largely of primary schools.

And then we are going to have to get on with trying to make it work. We should already be preparing for that. "There is no final victory, as there is no final defeat," said Tony Benn. "There is just the same battle. To be fought, over and over again. So toughen up, bloody toughen up."

For a start, 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.