Painting and Decorating

Paint? People chanting, entirely accurately, outside your office? Crybaby MPs, unless you have had hands around your throat in an attack planned in a Cabinet Minister's office, or something comparable such as a shot fired at you, then make way for someone who has earned his spurs. A death threat will not do. You rank with me only if you have had an attempt on your life. Sir Stephen Timms voted for a ceasefire.

The story goes that the people who are still pursuing me put a hit on me in prison, but the hitman took such a liking to me that he gave them their money back. I do not know that for a fact, though. Whereas I do know about the time that the right-wing Labour machine, Her Then Majesty's Then Government, physically tried to murder me. Match that, or hold your tongue in the presence of your betters.

Jo Cox, you say? No lone wolf, Thomas Mair was a very well-known and longstanding activist in the network that rioted at the Cenotaph this Armistice Day, injuring nine Police Officers, as had always been the intention from the decision to go equipped with bladed articles but not with firearms. Failure to vote for an armistice was an endorsement of that riot, and thus of the subculture that staged it, the only people who wish to attend a march in imitation of one led by Marine Le Pen.

There is no political difference between that subculture and the right-wing Labour machine; between Mair and Cox, with her deep roots in the NGO sector. Centrism and right-wing populism are both con tricks, designed to sell the same extreme and unpopular economic and foreign policies to different audiences by pretending to wage a culture war. In reality, the average Guardian writer or Labour MP leads a much more conventional life than many a counterpart on the Conservative benches or the Telegraph. And hegemony belongs to the social and cultural purpose of neoliberalism and basis of neoconservatism.

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.