Lock and Load

Labour would keep the triple lock on pensions if the Tories did. Seriously, that is now the policy. Everyone whose support for the triple lock was a matter of principle, should now be among those who picketed when Dodgy Keir Mather took his seat. At the front should of course be Jamie Driscoll and Ken Loach, the latter flush from a long overdue victory over Rachel Reeves in the libel courts.

Apparently permanently free of the Labour whip, Diane Abbott could remind us all that when the Home Secretary had to answer to her rather than to Yvette Copper, then there was no painting over of murals lest they give some small pleasure to children, nor was a noticeably black and working-class women violently arrested in front of her small child for non-payment of a bus fare that she had in fact paid, and nor did Suella Braverman break the law by denying three pounds per week to provide healthy food for children aged one to three and for pregnant women. Had Abbott still been in post, then the Police Officers from the Stephen Lawrence case would be on remand. The apologetic Abbott remains beyond the Pale, while the unapologetic Kim McGuinness is the Labour candidate for Mayor of the North East. Whatever might be the difference between the two?

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.