Honesty and Transparency?

Keir Starmer is planning to give the already knighted Sadiq Khan a peerage. Standard stuff under any Government, of course. If neither Ken Livingstone nor Boris Johnson has ever been ennobled, then neither of them was Mayor of London for as long as Khan has now been, and in any case, to my certain knowledge, Jeremy Corbyn seriously considered it for Livingstone even though they had never, and I do mean never, been the best of brethren. It is possible that Johnson has declined it because, like Ted Heath before him, he will believe to his dying day that one day he was going to be Prime Minister again.

But speaking of Johnson, if Nigel Farage needed hundreds of new Peers to get his programme through, then he might look to Aaron Roy, who was a Labour councillor in Hartlepool at the start of this week, who defected to Reform UK with great fanfare and in Farage's presence last night, who is an Indian national, who has been in this country only 10 years, whose real name is probably not Aaron Roy, and whom Georgina Hollifield, Membership Officer of Stockton and Hartlepool Green Party, spotted at a "Left Alliance" meeting a few days ago, speaking to Your Party and to the Green Party.

20 councillors joined Reform on 14 January. Five had been Independents, but 14 had been Conservatives, and one had been in the Green Party. Green and Reform councillors both vote for austerity, alongside Labour, Conservative, and Liberal Democrat councillors. Alongside Conservative and Lib Dem parliamentarians, Green and Reform parliamentarians vote against even such limited workers' rights as Labour proposed. Vote Green, and you may as well vote for Farage. Vote Reform, and you may as well vote for Zack Polanksi.

A Portsmouth City Councillor of 30 years' standing, Jason Fazackarley, who had sat both as a Green and for Labour, moved in November from the Lib Dems, who had made him Lord Mayor, to Reform, following at least one other sitting Lib Dem councillor, Jeff Sumner of Burnley. A Reform candidate to sit alongside Councillor Fazackarley is Addy Mo Asaduzzaman, a Boriswave immigrant who does not hold British nationality and who expresses the desire eventually to return to Bangladesh. From Labour to Reform defected, among at least five others nationwide last year, Councillor Mason Humberstone of Stevenage, who contested internal Labour Party elections on the slate of Morgan McSweeney's and Josh Simons's infamous Labour Together. Reform expects to take the Stevenage parliamentary seat from Labour.

And so it goes on. Under a Reform Government, Roy and Asaduzzaman would be unable to vote for themselves, with Commonwealth citizens in the position of women under 30 between 1918 and 1928, when they could be parliamentary candidates but they could not vote.