And All For 30p?

From Labour, through the Conservatives, to Reform UK, all in six years and all in his fifties, there is no suggestion that Lee Anderson’s views have ever changed. Centrism and right-wing populism are con tricks to sell exactly the same economic and foreign policies to different audiences by pretending to wage a culture war.

And what, exactly, is Anderson’s audience? Is he famous on the Red Wall? Have you ever heard him mentioned down the pub? In any case, the boundary changes have deliberately changed the Conservatives’ main competitors back to the Liberal Democrats in the liberal, Thatcherite, Remainer heartlands of the South. At Ashfield last time, second place, with a remarkable 13,498 votes and 27.6 per cent, went to Jason Zadrozny, who still leads the Independents who hold 32 of the 35 seats on the District Council. The swing to him matched the swing against Labour almost exactly, while the Conservative percentage went down. The Brexit Party came fourth with 2,501 votes, 5.1 per cent, less than half of Anderson’s margin of victory. Its candidate, Martin Daubney, is now Anderson’s colleague at GB News, where losses grew by 38 per cent in the 2023 financial year, to £42.4 million. Populism without popularity. 10 years ago, on joining UKIP, Douglas Carswell and Mark Reckless presented themselves at by-elections, which they won. Tellingly, Anderson has no such intention.

Amid the nostalgia about economically egalitarian and socially conservative MPs from the patriotic working class, it is considered a national emergency that a real, live one has been elected. George Galloway’s two leaflets were mutually dependent, and if it matters, then he received too many votes to have been returned predominantly by Muslims. Those who bewail Greenery, wokery, the EU, and sometimes also wars of liberal intervention, would have preferred Britain if the miners had won. I am not a member of the Workers Party of Britain, but it has an MP, so it deserves as much coverage as the Green Party, and more than Reform UK, which has not secured the election of an MP under its own banner. TalkTV is moving online, so Freeview’s channel 237 should go to us, the pro-Brexit and anti-woke Left of Britain’s most recently elected MP.

I have no plan to join the Workers Party, but nor would I expect to stand against it. If, however, it did not contest North Durham, then I would. 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. We have made a start.