Weak Foundation

It had always been visible from outer space that Tom Moore’s daughter was a grifter. In any case, it should never have been his job to have funded the NHS. Centenarians doing sponsored laps of their gardens recalls the Bullseye of my childhood, when people played for the money to buy equipment for their local hospitals.

All three parties have been in government, so they are all to blame, while media coverage is always of the question of “whether we can still afford” the NHS. There is much use of the obligatory, bone idle line about “the national religion”, the purpose of which is to suggest that the people’s overwhelmingly strong support for the NHS could not have the rational and empirical basis that the media, like the political parties, would lazily regard as the opposite of religious belief.

As is their wont, the cancelled are everywhere, with the deplatformed taking their usual place on every platform to canter around it their hobbyhorse of “social insurance”. But that more bureaucratic version of National Insurance is not the insurance peddled by their paymasters. Do not believe a word of it. From any party.

And 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.