As A Body Is First Recognised

I do not spit the word "Murdoch" as if anyone else, such as The Guardian or the BBC, were any better. On the contrary, Mick Hume would have a point, were it not for the fact that what he feared would never be done by what was once again Rupert Murdoch's Labour Party, led by a man who was writing for The Sun only last week.

Keir Starmer, Rachel Reeves, Wes Streeting, Sadiq Khan and Anas Sarwar were all at Murdoch's summer party with Rebekah Brooks, even though Starmer's campaign video for Labour Leader had made much of his prosecution of her, failing to mention that she had been acquitted.

Media that depend heavily or entirely on giant corporate advertising are all out for Starmer. When he was recently confronted by protesters, then ITV, which has no other source of income, cut them out of its footage and did not mention them.

But Mick may be assured that, as surely as to this site, nothing like Section 40 of the Crime and Courts Act 2013 would ever apply to my weekly magazine of news and comment, or to my monthly cultural review, or to my quarterly academic journal, or, should I ever get round to it, to my fortnightly satirical magazine.

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.