Case and Calculation

Simon Case is back after having been paid £50,000 to avoid the Covid-19 Inquiry, but the rise in average earnings excluding bonuses has slowed to 6.6 per cent, unemployment remains at 4.2 per cent, and a Labour Party that thinks that everything in the economy is hunky dory would need a swing of 8.3 per cent just to become the largest party, or 12.7 per cent, the largest swing in its history, to win an overall majority. There is no other way of putting this. I told you so.

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.