Changing Times

Centrism is a con, and anyone who still doubted that should note that it is in The Times that Suella Braverman has launched her Leadership campaign, specifically with an explicit attack on the operational independence of the Police, as well with a very thinly veiled commitment to abolish what little remained of the right to protest.

This deranged woman must be stopped, and everyone who had given her any quarter must be taken down with her. That includes a so-called Opposition that has failed to oppose much of her and her predecessor's horrific programme, and which has no policy of repealing any of it. Why would it have? That programme is fully in the spirit of Tony Blair and of his succession of ghoulish Home Secretaries.

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.