Billericay Dickie

I always got on with Richard Holden, but I am not aware that he was ever called "Ric" up here, although another diminutive was sometimes used. As to the chicken run, we do want national politicians and even international statespersons, do we not?

Yet the present array of candidates from MPs' staff, party staff, Westminster thinktanks, and the Westminster media, has given us as a General Election about slightly less than two per cent of the education budget (since that is what VAT on private school fees would raise), about compulsory volunteering, and about giving the vote to people who needed only to wait another two years to acquire it.

Local representation is the point of First Past the Post, or else we may as well have national party lists. But most people vote as if we already did. First Past the Post has delivered hung Parliaments at two of the last four General Elections, including in 2017, when the two main parties could hardly have been said to have been difficult to tell apart.

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.

I am standing for Parliament as an Independent here at North Durham. 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.