Payslips, Indeed

Utter drivel all day, and I am not only talking about that. We all know what is really causing inflation, but saying it would amount to saying what could be done about it, and that would never do. Wages are so low that there have been strikes for a year. They are 0.8 per cent behind inflation, meaning that they have fallen in real terms, as of course everyone can see all day, every day. They are lower than they were in 2003. 20 years ago. Twenty.

The Labour Party cannot even see the problem, banning its MPs from standing on picket lines, and committing itself to whatever happened to be the Conservatives' tax and spending policies at the time of the next General Election. Those policies would remain in place until there was growth, meaning forever, because they are not delivering growth now, so they would not deliver it in the future, either.

Labour would thus have rendered the next General Election pointless, except that 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.