At The Threshold

42 per cent of adults have incomes that do not reach the income tax threshold of £12,570. Two out of every five adults, many millions of them in full-time work, are getting by on less than £1050 per month. 

Every one of them has the vote. Someone is going to make a serious pitch for those votes sooner or later, and my money would be on sooner. If not at the next General Election, then at the one after that.

As it is, they have no reason to vote for any of the three main parties in England or the four in Scotland, and most of them have reason not to vote for each of the four main parties in Wales, even though they are now the decisive voters.

The old coal and steel belts of Britain are now electorally pivotal, yet nothing like as much money can be found for us as can in theory be found for the old coal and steel belt of Ukraine, even though much of that is in fact on the other side.

Or to put it another way, parties that ought to be courting the famously solidarity-minded old coal and steel communities of Britain are instead supplying lethal weapons to the people who have been harrowing Donetsk and Luhansk since 2014.

This is rapidly going to become a pattern of resentment across the West. The Democrats in the White House and on Capitol Hill can find trillions of dollars for 40 million Ukrainians, but not one red cent for 40 million American descendants of slavery. And so on.