Mandate To Secure

The SNP currently has 43 MPs. Call that 41 after the boundary changes. The majority of the 57 seats in Scotland next year could be as few as 29, which would be a loss of 12 even on the SNP's present figure, never mind the number of MPs that it returned in 2019. Yet that majority would apparently constitute a mandate for independence. No one else would see it like that, so those 29 or more MPs would make it their business to wreak havoc. That is the real point of this strategic change.

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. Much less the SNP.