Marching Orders?

Again I ask whether the Royal British Legion has objected to Saturday's planned expression of the opinion of 76 per cent of the population. Armistice Day is the perfect day to march for a ceasefire.

"Armistice Weekend"? They are just making it up now. This march is not on Remembrance Sunday, it will start hours after the two minutes' silence (the point of which on Armistice Day has always been that it interrupted what was otherwise a normal day), it will go nowhere near the Cenotaph, and in fact as a march from Hyde Park to the American Embassy, it will be a march away from central London. And there has never been any such thing as "Armistice Weekend".

Suella Braverman is goading Rishi Sunak into sacking her, so that she can launch her bid for the Leadership and the Premiership. Yet the other side agrees with her on everything from this march to homelessness. 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.