No Gray Area

Sue Gray of British intelligence is fighting Morgan McSweeney of American intelligence for control of the most inexperienced politician ever to have become the Leader of the Opposition.

For all their faults, the House of Commons is the citizens' assembly that should decide on constitutional changes or on questions such as assisted suicide, while the local authority is the citizens' assembly that should make the detailed decisions on matters such as housebuilding, within an overall framework set by Parliament. Those bodies are inadequately representative in class terms and in the closely related terms of a lack of ideological diversity, both of which at once reflect and perpetuate the inadequacies of the political parties. But "citizens' assemblies" or "citizens' juries" would be so to an even greater extent.

Still, 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.