Cancel, Culture

Tolpuddle Village Hall has cancelled Oh, Jeremy Corbyn: The Big Lie, so it really is over to Ben Sellers to show it at the People's Bookshop during this coming Durham Miners' Gala weekend. It should also be shown on Freeview, along with Killing Kelly, The Great NHS Heist, Solidarity, Adult Human Female, and SS in Britain. That this has not already happened, since there is not already an obvious channel for it, says everything about who is deplatformed.

So no, I am not going to stop working to create a thinktank, a weekly magazine of news and comment, a monthly cultural review, a quarterly academic journal, and perhaps eventually a 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 magazine need to be up and running at the start of the forthcoming General Election year. If you do not like that, then carry on doing your worst.

You see, 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 Keir 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.