Neither Comprehensive Nor Progressive

If anything in the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership presented the slightest obstacle to our going back into the European Union, then the Government would never have signed up to it. Being in the EU was rubbish. Brexit is rubbish. Being back in the EU will be rubbish. But we are now closer in time to reaccession than to the referendum, which was seven years ago. It is not going to be seven years before Britain re-joined the EU. Not only Margaret Thatcher's Single Market and the Customs Union, but the eurozone and the Schengen Area as well. No referendum. A handful of votes against in the Commons. No division in the Lords. Royal Assent with one of those occasional Buckingham Palace statements which explicitly welcomed a political development. Thoroughly celebratory television coverage, largely of primary schools.

If you have to keep saying "See Pee Tee Pee Pee", then you need a better name for it. But we already had free trade agreements with most of the countries in it. All that joining it gets us are its attacks on public services and on workers' rights, and its low consumer and environmental standards, all due to its anti-democratic system of arbitration. Much like the Single Market and the Customs Union. We were in the EU when we privatised our water and started pumping raw sewage all over our beaches, with the profits rolling into the campaign and other coffers of our rulers. The EU or the CPTPP? Who says that they cannot do both? Watch them.

The CPTPP is supposed to take until 2050, Twenty Fifty, to deliver even a tiny economic return on its surrender of democracy and of democracy's fruits. 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.