Under The Same Roof

Like the periodic renationalisation of various franchises, Great British Railways, "a new public body that will bring the operation of track and trains under the same roof and oversee timetables and ticketing," is delaying the inevitable. An inevitability that is also colossally popular. Although it would still have to be run by the right people.

Something similar applies to the granting of new oil and gas drilling licences in the North Sea, a strategically brilliant challenge to the Green-allied SNP in the marginal seats of the North East of Scotland. We need to harness the power of the State in order to deliver an all-of-the-above energy policy based around civil nuclear energy and this country's vast reserves of the coal that is also needed to make steel, for all that they are still officially planning to build their wind turbines out of bamboo and their electric cars out of marshmallow.

Around those twin poles of nuclear power and of the clean coal technology in which Britain was the world leader until the defeat of the Miners' Strike, let there be oil, gas, lithium, wind, solar, tidal, and everything else, bathing this country in heat and light. This is why we have a State.

And thanks to the all-of-the-above energy policy, let there be an all-of-the-above transport policy based around publicly owned railways running on the electricity that public ownership would also supply to charging points in every neighbourhood and village. Astonishingly, and yet not, the fewest charging points for electric vehicles are in the areas that still stand on a thousand years' worth of coal. Of course, every station would have a fully staffed ticket office. And the all-of-the-above transport policy, based around public transport free at the point of use, would include properly regulated pedicabs, although not having been to London since before the Plague, I had never heard the word until today, and I had had no idea that the place had been taken over by rickshaws. Still, let a thousand flowers bloom. In a well-tended garden.

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.