Powering Up

You do not need to ban petrol and diesel cars if no one builds them anymore, anyway. For good or ill, the car industry has already decided for itself to go all-electric, so all that Rishi Sunak has done today has been to rule out measures that were in any case never going to be attempted. No one in a position to do these things ever did suggest taxing meat, or having compulsory car sharing, or making you have seven different bins. But Sunak has placed the idea in people's heads that those had been the Conservatives' policies until he had become Prime Minister (so when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer, then?) and that they were still Labour's. This General Election is far from over.

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 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.