No Kidding

Eight years ago tonight, Harriet Harman's whip to abstain denied Andy Burnham the Leadership of the Labour Party, and guaranteed that it would be won on the first round by Jeremy Corbyn, who defied that whip and voted against starving the kiddies.

The Conservatives will pull the same trick in reverse at some point in the next year, but when it came to their rabbit out of the hat on child poverty, then Labour will split three ways, with a whip to abstain, but with more rebels voting against such action than voting in favour of it.

The hard choice is not to leave something as it is, but to change it. Food poverty is a lesson to those who would hope that the closure of ticket offices might reduce rail fares. Have self-service checkouts reduced the price of food? Scrapping the two-child benefit cap would cost £1.3 billion. The two-year contract for the barges is costing us £1.6 billion.

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.