Of Our Own Agency

This morning, 11 trade unions and the TUC secured a High Court judgment that the Government's strike-breaking agency worker regulations were unlawful. How long was it between that ruling and Rishi Sunak's acceptance of the pay review bodies' recommendations? An hour? It was certainly not two hours.

Thus was Wes Streeting struck dumb on Politics Live. But then, only four of those unions were affiliated to the Labour Party, another literally got up and walked out of the Labour Party Conference in 2021, and the largest of the four has just held a previously unthinkable Conference vote on disaffiliation.

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.