Split This

What do you mean, "Splitting the Labour vote"? A political party does not own votes, and in any case who is going to vote for Jamie Driscoll who might otherwise have voted for adherence to the Conservatives' tax and spending proposals, for the retention of the two-child benefit cap, for even higher real terms cuts to public sector pay, against any increase in statutory sick pay, and against the renationalisation of the railways or the utilities?

This afternoon, having declared his Independent candidacy for Mayor of the North East, Jamie raised in less than two hours the £25,000 that he had given himself until the end of August to come up with, although fundraising is very much ongoing.

Against him, Labour has selected Kim McGuinness with 76 per cent of the vote, but it refuses to say how many of the 14,000 or so eligible votes were cast. She is one of those self-parodies of a right-wing Labour woman, complete with being a racist, as right-wing Labourites always are, just as they are always anti-intellectuals.

12 years before she kept Nicu Ion off the shortlist, McGuinness tweeted, with this punctuation, "fuck off! I am not a gypsy!" The apologetic Diane Abbott remains without the Labour whip. Yet the unapologetic McGuinness is the Labour Party candidate for Mayor of the North East, and is Northumbria's Police and Crime Commissioner.

The North East's large Conservative minority has always known that its candidate was going to come second, but this is the chance to put Labour's in third place. Months before the General Election, a failure to win the Mayoralty that covered Northumberland, Newcastle, North Tyneside, South Tyneside, Sunderland, Gateshead and County Durham would be devastating for the Labour Party. Bring it on.

And 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.