The Boys Are Back In Town

Apparently, young men are becoming more right-wing. Not so long ago, they were the backbone of what was then this country's very left-wing mass movement. Many of us ended up as exasperated critics of Jeremy Corbyn's. But we were not his enemies. When it came to those, then nothing struck more fear into their hearts than his popularity with young men.

Alongside a collapse in male employment that had in any case largely happened by the time that they had come along, the defining experience of their own politics had been to have grown up under Governments, of all three parties, that had harvested young men in wars with a sheer pointlessness that had not been seen since 1918.

Hence their attraction and attachment to a politician who had opposed every single one of those wars, just as he had opposed the collapse in that employment. And hence the determination to neutralise them by destroying him. The ones coming up now would identify both state action and the Labour Party with middle-class, female control over everyone else, but especially over them.

Yet while Corbynism is gone, Corbyn himself is not, and those of us who never did buy into the prioritisation of identity politics, into the Greenery, or into the appeasement of anti-democratic supranationalism, are quietly but determinedly regrouping. My own magazine and thinktank are both coming along nicely, and there is plenty more going on as well. A parliamentary seat has recently been won. For comparison, the heavily publicised Reform UK's one MP has been obtained by defection, and its new partner, Traditional Unionist Voice, has one more councillor in Northern Ireland than Reform has in the whole of Great Britain.

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.

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.