Huw Cares?

Hillsborough has still never brought down The Sun, so today's developments certainly will not. And we are days away from the twentieth anniversary of the death of Dr David Kelly. The BBC survived that, so it will survive this. For 12 years after the age for topless models had been raised to 18, The Sun was publishing such photographs of subjects who must have been scouted when they were 17. EastEnders is currently running its third 12-year-old father storyline in two years, this time depicting the whole thing as perfectly normal.

When it comes to the protection of 17-year-old boys, then the real worry is that every political party that has been in government anywhere in Great Britain this century is aggressively and unconditionally supportive, in marked contrast to the electorate that has to live under it, of a Government that regards the deliberate killing of such youths, and indeed of unarmed 16-year-olds, as a jolly day out.

But 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.