Don't Mone, Organise

Three new migrant detention centres for a thousand people (across all three sites, not at each of them) are to cost £306 million for "up to" six years. That is 30 times the cost of the hotels. Someone is seriously being paid here. And judging by the silence of the Opposition, that public money is not being passed on to only one side.

The Police gave Michele Mone a week's notice to clear out of Britain before they acted against her. Give that a moment to sink in. Unsurprisingly, then, there has no more been an application to extradite her than there has been an application for an Unexplained Wealth Order against her. I do not agree with UWOs without a conviction, but they are law.

And then, in the last couple of days, she was back in London, getting her face in the papers for having patronised a swanky restaurant. While owing the rest of us the £232 million that we paid to a company that was less than three weeks old, that employed no one, that had no contract or premises, that had never made any transaction, that had all of £100 in the bank, and that duly delivered absolutely nothing. Presumably, she has once again left the country.

Once again, the Opposition has nothing to say, any more than it has on Rishi Sunak's endless transfers of public money to the interests of his wife's family. Keir Starmer inherited a solvent party that raised money from its huge membership and from trade unions with which it was not ashamed to be associated. He has intentionally brought it to the perpetual brink of bankruptcy so that it can keep being bailed out by the beneficiaries of a corruption that is completely out of control. He will have his cut. Even HMRC rents its offices from a company that is registered in a tax haven, from which it makes political donations in Britain. Starmer has no plan to change any of this. Well, of course not.

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 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.