Barging Backwards

In ordering more barges after the first one turned out to have been awash with Legionella, the Government is adopting the policy of the Labour Party.

Afghanistan has been occupied by Britain four times in the last 200 years, with the fourth ending only two years ago this month, when we handed the place back to the Taliban after 20 years of war for absolutely nothing, leaving them arms beyond their wildest dreams. Now Afghans are dying in the Channel, having taken to small boats because we refused to give them safe and legal routes into Britain.

We waft in people from Ukraine, but they "look like us". France is closer to Ukraine than Britain is, so why do we not demand that Ukrainians stay there? And what cultural values are they bringing? If every regional commissar in charge of military recruitment in Russia had been sacked for corruption, then there would be no other news.

I cannot see what the European Convention on Human Rights has ever achieved, although at least it does not constrain a future Parliament by defining social rights and thus rendering unconstitutional anything beyond that definition. All of this is happening while we are in it. But there will never be a Commons majority to leave it. Suella Braverman is not interested in doing things. She is interested in rousing her rabble by seeming to have been "blocked". Yet as an alternative to her and Robert Jenrick, we are offered only Yvette Cooper, who is as wicked as they are, and Stephen Kinnock, who is as stupid as they are.

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.