Personal And Business Account

Woke capitalism is the only possible form of either. Consider both the social and cultural changes, and the economic ones, since the dawn of the Age of Austerity in 2010, long before Brexit, or Covid-19, or the war in Ukraine. At least 14 million people, more than one in five, have had a cost of living crisis for at least 13 years, and in many cases for anything up to 47, since the Labour Budget of December 1976.

And here we. Nigel Farage's banking difficulties, which much of the Left has always had. The companies that sponsor Pride. The people who fund Just Stop Oil. The podcast on which George Osborne and Ed Balls will pretend that they used to disagree, as Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart have been pretending for some time.

There will be no respite from any of this while either main party was in government on its own, or with the other, or with the Liberal Democrats, or in principle, although neither Labour nor the Conservatives would ever consider it in practice, with the SNP. While the situation was very different in Northern Ireland, there was no such respite in Great Britain when a Conservative Government was dependent on the confidence of the DUP.

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.