Get In The Sea

South Dorset was a Labour seat from 2001 to 2010, having come within 77 votes of becoming one in 1997. Clearly, though, Labour has no desire to win it back. No one in Portland or Weymouth wants the Bibby Stockholm, which is staffed by former Prison Officers despite "not being a prison ship". The Prison Service has just confirmed that it is dangerously understaffed, so why is the State paying for this instead?

Different local people have diametrically opposed reasons for not wanting the barge, but no one does want it, and simple opposition from the party that had retained second place there through the last four General Elections might have been enough to have made a difference.

We are paying £400 million per year to rent something that it would cost only £50 million to buy. It is a floating Grenfell Tower waiting to happen. Even while unused, it was still being paid for, and that would apply again. That money is now very much in circulation, and we can all see where some of it is going. Stephen Kinnock wants more than one barge. Everyone can see why.

As it is, someone, probably the Greens, will put up whoever had organised the welcome party, someone else will put up whoever had organised the unwelcome party, and they will both lose their deposits as Richard Drax retained his seat.

As for Lee Anderson, five years ago, at the age of 51 and well into the Corbyn Leadership, he was a Labour Councillor and the office manager for a Labour MP. Did he believe then anything that he says now? He is just a grifter. He seems set to lose his seat, yet to whom? The people for whom Labour nominations are being stitched up inspire no more confidence than he does.

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.