Data Protection

"Labour wouldn't sell your NHS data to Palantir," says Wes Streeting, secure in the knowledge that it will have happened before he came to office. He will give no commitment to reverse it.

Streeting is openly in politics for the express purpose of privatising the entire NHS in England, and as the last reshuffle showed, he has reached the cap on his ambitions in view of the heavily public school Labour intake that the last three by-election victories have already begun. He would be Keir Starmer's only ever Health Secretary.

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 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.