On The Horizon

Such is Keir Starmer's confidence in his party's current and putative MPs that he openly intends to create 100 Peers in order to staff his Government. None of them will now be Paula Vennells, but all of them will be just like her, many of them will know her, and none of them will think that she had done anything wrong.

Nor will any of them see the problem in what had officially caused the mere demotion of Claudine Gay, although of course they would scream blue murder if someone other than a liberal did the same thing. Imagine, for the sake of argument, that Cornel West turned out to be a plagiarist. Singularly improbable, I know, but they have already thrown everything else at him. Yet Rachel Reeves is a proven plagiarist who will no doubt progress from her political career to join her sycophantic reviewers in an academic sinecure.

Gay's union-busting interim successor from Big Pharma has a Labour peerage and ministerial portfolio written all over him. His British equivalents very much exist. 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 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.