Science, Innovation and Technology

A Cabinet Minister has apologised, and ostensibly paid damages, for having baselessly accused a university professor of being a supporter of a proscribed terrorist organisation. But she has not resigned, and those damages have in fact been paid out of the public purse. Yet we are not allowed to know the sum of money.

The Official Opposition can say nothing, because its tactics are exactly the same. It is controlled by the people who have spent nine years saying about Jeremy Corbyn precisely what Corbyn is suing Nigel Farage for having said about him. Would that Corbyn had found this fighting spirit anything up to nine years ago. Look at the enthusiasm for Farage among those who used to affect to despise him. Centrism and right-wing populism are con tricks, designed to sell the same economic and foreign policies to different audiences by pretending to wage a culture war. We are the enemy, and proud to be so.

Reform UK has acquired a councillor since yesterday, taking its total elected representation to nine councillors, fewer than the members of many a Group that existed on only one local authority, and no MPs. There are no elections on a Monday, so this increase has not been by election. How many of the nine have been elected as Reform? Likewise, when centrism put up as its unvarnished self in the form of Change UK, then it never elected anyone to anything. It is the Workers Party of Britain that has just elected a real, live, actual member of the House of Commons, returned with its name next to his on the ballot paper.

The WPB is the party that I wish best, but I have no plan to join it. Against capitalism and its wars, I want to defend the sanctity of each individual human life from the point of fertilisation to the point of natural death. Therefore, I want 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.

Social solidarity is an expression of personal responsibility, personal responsibility is protected by social solidarity, international solidarity is an expression of national sovereignty, and national sovereignty is protected by international solidarity. Equality and diversity must include economic equality and class diversity, regional equality and regional diversity, the equal sovereignty of diverse states, and equal respect for diverse opinions within a framework of free speech and other civil liberties, including due process of law with the presumption of innocence, requiring that conviction be beyond reasonable doubt. We have never not been cancelled, so we need no lectures on cancel culture from those who have always silenced us but who now bellow that they themselves are being silenced.

In the struggle for economic equality, the leading role belongs to those who suffer most from its absence, namely the working class, while in the struggle for international peace, the leading role belongs to those who suffer most from its absence, namely the working class and the youth. But I am 46, and one of my great-grandfathers, born in the nineteenth century, was a headmaster with the MBE. The same honour was held by his grandson, my mother's late brother, after whom a seamount is named, as much as anything in lieu of the OBE with which he did not live to retire. A seamount. Named after my uncle.

At the time of my birth, my late father was entitled to use the style "The Venerable", and he did. Even in the most middle-class ward for miles around, I had two school governorships before I had left university, and that is not exactly diluted by the fact that I was appointed to the second while reading for my second Durham degree, a much rarer thing at the turn of the century. I already held both positions when I turned 23, I was well into both of them when I took my MA, and I held the first before I had taken my BA. Around 90,000 people would theoretically be eligible for my former public position, which someone else filled for three years until 37 weeks ago, but which has now been been kept open for 37 weeks and counting. It's not what you know, but even if it were, then you would still arrive at my name. I was also the only candidate when I got it the first time, while on bail. Prosecute that. Safeguard that, not that you still can. It runs deep in me. Deep.

And even in Britain, never mind farther afield, Labour was not the first party to have been ruined by my sort. If we wish well the new, and so far spectacularly successful, vehicle for economic equality with an independent and pacific foreign policy, then we should assist it in every way apart from joining it. We take things over, while other people, although they often hate themselves for it, allow and expect us to take over. And we bring with us our academic and social ties to anti-industrial Malthusianism, to the identity politics that have been able to fill the gap left by that deindustrialisation, and to the undemocratic supranational institutions that have been the driving forces of both. Tom Harwood's on-air horror at the election of George Galloway made a nonsense of Harwood's professed advocacy of an all-of-the-above energy policy and of a YIMBY housebuilding policy. An MP had just been returned specifically with that programme.

GB News's losses grew by 38 per cent in the 2023 financial year, to £42.4 million, but it is TalkTV that is to be the first to go online only. Who is to be given channel 237 on Freeview? It should be we who were at least broadly in line with Britain's newest elected MP, the pro-Brexit and anti-woke Left. And 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.