Literae Humaniores

Nowhere near as long ago as it feels, Angela Rayner told a Labour Party Conference that, “The sum of human knowledge is the fruit of thousands of years of human labour. The discoveries of maths and science; the great works of literature and art; the arc of human and natural history itself; and so much more that there is to learn. All of it should be our common inheritance. Because knowledge belongs to the many, not the few. This is our historic purpose as a movement. Not just to be a voice for the voiceless. But to give them a voice of their own.”

At least a section of the Labour Right was once as bookish as the Left, but Tony Blair elbowed aside Gordon Brown when John Smith died, and education came to be seen as completed by a degree the worth of which was defined purely by its economic utility. Here we are again.

Well, I once lost an election to an Old Etonian who was reading Classics, although I later shared a house with him. Such defeat happens to the best of us, Jeremy, since the last Leader to have won a General Election had a Classics degree. He was useless, but it was not. Thankfully, no one is ever going to stop Old Etonians from pursuing the humanities. Ask yourself why someone would try and stop anyone else in particular from doing so.

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.