Utility

Give me an argument against the renationalisation of the profiteering energy companies. Their vastly increased takings have resulted directly from an act of the State, while some of them have invoked its power to break into people's homes and install prepayment meters. There is a word for the merger of state and corporate power to the point of physical violence.

Yet in the course of cheering on the starvation of children, Rachel Reeves defends NatWest and Coutts against Nigel Farage even as the guilty parties are forced to resign, and the collapse in Labour Party membership, which is not the mark of a party that people expected to win a General Election, is held up as a good thing because it meant that the party could rely on corporate donations instead.

10,000 people have left in the last two months alone, and the 200,000 departees since Keir Starmer became Leader are more numerous than Labour Party members were overall under Tony Blair. Labour has never before experienced such a collapse in membership. But in making it dependent on those who raked it in from rocketing prices and interest rates, this is positively applauded.

As ever with cancel culture, if you think that what has at least been attempted against Farage could never happen to you, then you are probably right, and in that case, you are certainly not on the Left. We have never not been cancelled, but now it is happening to people who never expected it, and their ability to obtain a hearing is undeniably useful, even if it does prove that they have not been deplatformed, as we always have been. We do not have a Freeview television station.

Labour has picked its side. To the surprise of absolutely nobody at all. 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 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.