Exacerbating Factor

They will come up with some cover story as to why Boris Johnson had not after all done I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here, but the truth is that his known cocaine use would have precluded his admission to Australia. This time last year, this person was Prime Minister.

The Police have found 59 per cent of the perpetrators of domestic violence to have been cocaine users, including 85 per cent in one area. They are affecting to be surprised at the scale, but they are not really, and nor is anyone else. Remember this?

Nor have matters improved under Rishi Sunak, with his repeated and now even habitual channelling of public money to his wife's family's company, with his £110 sale to party donors of the Teesside freeport that was worth more than £100 million, and with delights such as the payment of £400 million per year to rent a barge that it would cost only £50 million to buy, were it not a floating Grenfell Tower waiting to happen. Even while it cannot be used, it is still being paid for. That money is now very much in circulation.

Yet what are we offered instead? While promising to grant no more, Keir Starmer has promised to honour any and all oil and gas licences that had been issued in this Parliament; like my trade union, I am all in favour of such things, but that is not the present point, which is that Sunak has just made him look very silly.

That is as nothing, however, compared to the promise to stick to whatever might be the Government's tax and spending plans on the day of a General Election late next year. The Labour Party's policy is now to retain the triple lock on pensions if the Conservatives did. Yes, really. So much for that fact that, for example, merely taxing each of Britain's 173 billionaires down to one billion pounds per head would raise £1.1 trillion. What do you mean, they would leave? Where would they go, to get the deal that they currently had here? Come on. Where, exactly?

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.