We Go Where We're Needed Most

If Granny's estate was subject to inheritance tax, then she died richer than 24 out of 25 people who died in Britain that year. If your estate will be subject to inheritance tax, then you will die richer than 24 out of 25 people who will die in Britain that year. Any tears are not for you.

Rather, the "National Living Wage" is not the Living Wage at all, and today's supposed increase in it is of course a real terms cut. The failure to raise the income tax threshold in line with inflation has been one of the biggest tax increases ever, falling heavily on the working poor.

And for what? As the war on the disabled heats up again, remember that the Department for Work and Pensions spends far more contesting generally successful appeals against the denial of Personal Independence Payment, which does not preclude work, than it would cost simply to pay the benefit in the first place. Meanwhile, Deliveroo drivers are told that they have no right to trade union representation. I have been saying for years that the unions ought to be mutualising the gig economy, but little or nothing ever happens. All this, and all of our NHS data is to be sold to Peter Thiel's Palantir. Yet what are we offered instead? Wes Streeting.

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.