Block Votes

If Keir Starmer were to win a General Election late this year or in January of 2025, then he would be 62, and thus seeking to remain Prime Minister until he was at least 67. But if Jeremy Corbyn and Diane Abbott really are the "bed blockers" that Starmer's overmighty staff suggest, then let 25-year-old Keir and Keira be put up against them, one at Islington North, and the other at Hackney North and Stoke Newington. Go on. I dare you.

That said, I have known since 1989 the then Labour Party official whom the Forde Report found had called Abbott an Angry Black Woman, and he called me a Mulatto for years. A former London Regional Director of the Labour Party, he should be its candidate against her, or he is a coward.

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.

I have no plan to join the Workers Party of Britain, although nor would I expect to stand against it. If, however, it did not contest North Durham, then I would. 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.