Holding Steady?

We are expected to hang out the bunting for four per cent inflation. At least it is not what? Eight per cent? 12 per cent? 16 per cent? 20 per cent? If Ed Balls in those days, never mind John McDonnell at any time, had delivered four per cent inflation, then the same media that are trying to encourage dancing in the streets would have been inciting riots in the streets, and not without some small success that they would then have amplified to the point of a national emergency.

As it is, we have a national emergency now, and no small part of it is that the Official Opposition is pre-emptively committed to whatever happened to be this Government's economic policy on the day of the General Election. 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.