Indefensible

“The UK government is wasting billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money on “corporate welfare” for arms manufacturers that is siphoned into massive shareholder returns”? Hold the front page. The sixth biggest military expenditure in the world was obviously not going to the Armed Forces. Today, we see the Ministry of Defence intervening over the apparent debanking of arms companies. How is that the job of the MoD? Those are private companies.

Like health policy at least in England, British foreign and defence policy is bought and paid for. It is difficult to call it corruption when it is done, if not entirely in the open, then sufficiently so that no one can be in any doubt. The participants sincerely cannot see the problem. A country that need never go to war with anywhere is forever doing so, because that is understandably demanded by the arms companies that lavished a small portion of the vast profits on politicians across the ostensible spectrum.

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.