Go North East

And so the month-long bus strike is resolved just in time for Newcastle United at home to Manchester United. Even I am sometimes glad that football exists. It was a very close vote, so the Sunderland supporters must have held out. Free Go North East buses for a week from tomorrow. I am supposed to be on a diet, but what the hell.

Public transport should always be free. You will laugh at that until it happens, after which only the Labour Party will hold out against it, as that party now wants to reintroduce prescription charges in Scotland. The Conservatives do not. But Labour does. Labour is now the greater evil, worse than the Tories. We should no more want it to win the next General Election than most of its MPs wanted it to win the last two, or than any of its staff wanted it to win the last four.

But Jamie Driscoll is coming, with his Total Transport Network. And 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.