Air, Water, Fire

"Our air is not for sale," Andrew Smith told a cheering Labour Party Conference in 1996. You know what happened next. The last Labour Government, the archetype of any future one, privatised air traffic control. See how that has worked out.

Placing itself to the right of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, the Labour Party also supports the Government's plan to repeal the laws against water pollution, laws that it will have come as a surprise to most people existed at all.

I do not recall any absence of complaints about dirty water when we were in the EU, just as I do not notice any such absence while we are still in the ECHR, which will present no obstacle to the dismantlement of even the minimal standards that we nominally already enjoyed, just as neither the ECHR nor the EU prevented the privatisation of air traffic control or of anything else.

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.