Better Together

Any rhapsodising of Henry Kissinger is a confession of a war crime yet undiscovered. If that. Tony Blair has made a predictable intervention. But Shane MacGowan was devastating enough, before the news came through of my Right Honourable Kinsman.

When Alistair Darling was Chancellor of the Exchequer, then my mother, who was related to him only by marriage, maintained that my eyebrows would stay black when my hair had turned white. We may not now have long to find out. His idea of public stakes in the banks has proved remarkably long-lasting, even if too little has been made of it. At yesterday's Prime Minister's Questions, Rishi Sunak was confronted by a Conservative MP, Sarah Dines, about branch closures in her constituency by a bank that was largely publicly owned. Quite. "Our goal is to make finance the servant, not the master, of the real economy," said Darling (I never met him). We are still waiting.

Saint Andrew's Day seems apt. Like George Kerevan, Darling was part of the spectacularly successful IMG entryist operation in the Edinburgh Labour Party of the early 1980s. But unlike Kerevan, although he is now in Alba so things could be worse, Darling resisted to the last the dissolution of the British Labour Movement and of its achievements, right up to today's victory on the part of the RMT, pointedly an unaffiliated trade union led by a member of no political party. Under me, Unite would be like that. And if strikes did not work, then no one would bother trying to tell you that they did not work, nor would anyone be trying to ban them. A ban that the Labour Party would not repeal, having banned its MPs from standing on picket lines.

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 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.