Compromising?

The Angela Rayner story has it all. Right to Buy. The exemption of primary residences from capital gains tax, an arrangement that will one day look as bizarre as mortgage interest tax relief, which was also sacrosanct once. And, as with what ought to be the huge Anonyvoter scandal, the decision by institutional Britain that a three or four-term Labour Government was now a done deal with which it ought to make peace in advance, to the point of already treating the Labour Party as a self-policing state within the State.

Heaven knows that the powers that be have nothing to worry about. That Keir Starmer lied to win the Labour Leadership is a source of on-air hilarity to one Rosa Prince, whose book on Jeremy Corbyn may now be purchased on Amazon for 60p, having been published either before or very soon after she left school. It's not what you know.

Thames Water would not spend its bailout on infrastructure, so would a Starmer Government treat its directors' and its senior executives' 40 per cent pay claim as if it had been made by a trade union? Would it renationalise water, and that at no cost since the shares were now worthless? Would it then give the smelly homeless, not £2500 fines that they were obviously not going to pay, but instead the opportunity to wash? Would it repeal the legislation criminalising homelessness, and instead provide the homes that that legislation will do absolutely nothing to supply? Merely to ask those questions answers them.

This very day, Rachel Reeves has made it clear that she would keep the two-child benefit limit, as if that made third and subsequent children cease to exist. Members of Parliament may and do claim financial assistance for up to three children. When they are not engaged in other pursuits. If there is one thing that no one would ever want to see for sexual gratification, then it is an MP in the nude. Yet MPs themselves honestly seem to imagine that that might be the motivation. Handing over one's colleagues' contact details to a stranger on a dating app would be a sacking offence in any proper job. Yet although William Wragg is 10 years younger than I am, he is retiring at the General Election, making him the only person born in 1987 who will ever retire. What a racket. A racket that Reeves, Starmer and Rayner would do nothing to break, because they are in on it.

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 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.