Just The Ticket

The railway ticket offices have been saved, a magnificent victory for the public organised by, in, through and as the trade unions. Even the Daily Mirror broke with the right-wing Labour machine to support this campaign, and that is almost unheard of; indeed, it sided with the RMT instead, and the RMT has won. For be in no doubt, this triumph owes nothing to the Official Opposition, the Leader of which has today returned to the negative approval rating that he richly deserves.

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.

Jamie Driscoll has been endorsed by the RMT, which has become the lodestar that the NUM used to be, but without the inconvenience of affiliation to the Labour Party. Bring on his Total Transport Network. If Kim McGuinness sought the Labour nomination for the Northumbria Police and Crime Commissioner Election on the same day, then she would not even be pretending to believe that she could beat him.