Align With Our Values

Matching outfits. But remember, we are the ones who are a cult.

There ought to be disgusted derision that Tony Blair and Keir Starmer held this event at Blair's private, branded thinktank funded by the House of Saud. But Blair is younger than Jeremy Corbyn, so he should either put up at Islington North, or he should go away. It is hardly as if he needs the extra £5435 per annum that MPs are paid, tax free, to feed each of their children, up to the third child. Yes, third. And up to the age of 21 for offspring in full-time education. Rip-off degrees, indeed.

Support for the two-child benefit cap, including its underlying Malthusianism and eugenics, is one of the myriad points on which the "centrists" and the "populists" agree. Theirs are the only voices heard, yet the centrists are so eccentric that Change UK took three per cent of the vote and elected no one, while the populists are so unpopular that Reform UK averages six per cent in the few wards where it can find 10 people to sign its nomination papers, giving it 11 Councillors in the entire country and no MPs, while the Reclaim Party has acquired one MP by defection but has no Councillors, with neither UKIP nor the Heritage Party having any elected representation whatever.

There is a concerted campaign to take down GB News in time for the General Election year of 2024, and that includes the decision to reveal at this time what those addressing it must always have known about Dan Wootton. Nigel Farage should sue Coutts for having called him "xenophobic and racist". But the wider lesson of his case is that woke capitalism is the only possible form of either, and it is just as urgent that Ken Loach should sue Rachel Reeves for having called him an anti-Semite. When, far too late, Corbyn finally sued someone for having called him a terrorist sympathiser, then he won.

GB News is at least there for now. The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change is sadly likely to be there forever. Onwards, then, to our own thinktank, to our own weekly magazine of news and comment, to our own monthly cultural review, to our own quarterly academic journal, and perhaps eventually to our own fortnightly satirical magazine. In good, old-fashioned print, so that no one would be able to press a button and delete them. The thinktank and the weekly magazine need to be up and running by the start of the forthcoming General Election year. If you do not like that, then carry on doing your worst.

And 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.