The Caravan Moves On

Jamie Driscoll is coming up on Politics Live. He was on Newsnight last night. Kim McGuinness is never on anything, because they would either have to ask her about the Gypsies, or explain why they had not done so. It is already over for her.

Gypsy-baiting was fundamental to New Labour, like vilifying Muslims, like persecuting black people in general and young black men in particular, and like proving virility by further starving the children of the poor. From McGuinness, to today's treatment of Mish Rahman, to the two-child benefit cap, here we go again.

But as Jamie's supporters, First Past the Post is our dream come true. To put the belt and braces on it, then the Greens and the Left parties should refrain from standing against him. But he has always been highly likely to top what equated to the first round of a preferential election. McGuinness could quite conceivably come third. For Labour. In the North East. A few months before the General Election.

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.