Inflated Figures

Of course the Rwanda Bill sailed through unamended. The real story today is that inflation is up again, although that is not news to anyone, as is important in itself. Yet the Official Opposition's only problem with economic policy is that it is not implementing it. If that, in this age of the Monetary Policy Committee, the Office for Budget Responsibility, and the Economic Advisory Council, none of which, along with the plethora of pay review bodies and what have you, the Labour Party proposes to subject to democratic political control. Well, unless you counted keeping Rupert Harrison, George Osborne's long-time Chief of Staff and then Evening Standard employee, on the EAC once he was also the Conservative MP for Bicester and Woodstock.

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.