Beyond Question

This evening's Any Questions? panel was one for the ages, which will use it as a key artefact for the understanding of our own age. I quite like Sonia Sodha on certain issues, but tell me the fundamental and ultimate political difference between her and Alison McGovern. Tell me the fundamental and ultimate political difference between Mark Littlewood and Esther McVey. And then tell me the fundamental and ultimate political difference between Sodha-McGovernism and Littlewood-McVeyism. This is what a one-party state sounds like.

Look at Littlewood's party history, with no more suggestion that his views had changed than that Simon Danzcuk's had, and see beyond doubt that centrism and right-wing populism were both con tricks, designed to sell the same extreme and unpopular economic and foreign policies to different audiences by pretending to wage a culture war.

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. Much less Reform UK.