Mind The Cap, Not The Gap

Deputy Leader of the Labour Party is a separately elected position, so over to Angela Rayner to have the self-respect to resign her Shadow Cabinet portfolio, since they are in no way conditional on each other. It would not cost very much at all to lift the two-child benefit cap, yet tonight it looks as if Labour would also not increase one of the lowest statutory sick pay entitlements in the developed world.

Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves have promised to stick to the Conservatives' tax and spending plans, now including the abolition of inheritance tax. The Bank of England's inflation target is also to be left untouched. It is not going to be worth holding a General Election at all.

Or is it? 20 years ago, I was told that Labour supporters would rather not vote, than vote for me. They then proceeded not to vote for the person who had told me that. I could not possibly have done any worse. A small part of my wish that I had left the Labour Party over Iraq is my wish that I had stood as an Independent on that occasion.

My provenly unelectable interlocutor would certainly have some role in or around a Starmer Government. But on Thursday, standing as an Independent, one of the stars of The Labour Files beat a member of Starmer's staff out of the park at a by-election to a seat on Newham Borough Council, continuing the trend of municipal success on the part of left-wingers who had either been expelled from the Labour Party or resigned from it in disgust. They are vastly more popular than the "populist" Right, which never elects anyone.

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.