Da Esperança

Brazil is a potential market of well over 200 million, and Jeremy Corbyn is by far the British politician closest to its newly restored President Lula. Indeed, Corbyn is arguably Lula's closest political ally outside Latin America. He has a similar relationship with popular liberation movements in much of the world, while the defeated Jair Bolsonaro is politically and personally close to Tony Blair.

Those liberation movements have their faults, as does Lula, and as does Corbyn. But no one in the rising world has ever heard of Keir Starmer, and they would not like him. He is daily less liked even here, now that the money markets have overthrown a Government that had sought to implement his economic programme. He and his supporters deserve the same banishment as the likes of the Institute of Economic Affairs.

For 25 years, since I was a fresher at Durham, types from the City have been telling me that I "would be surprised" at the real political centre of gravity there. I am starting to believe them. Ken Livingstone worked very effectively with it for eight years, his office largely staffed by the Socialist Action whose presence at the same dinner as Jamie Driscoll is today enough to tickle Guido Fawkes.

As Shadow Shadow Chancellor for decades, and then on the frontbench, John McDonnell cultivated all sorts of links that Kwasi Kwarteng and the rest of the Tufties simply never did. They assumed that they had the Square Mile on side, when in fact nothing could have been further from the case. The City might not have liked any of McDonnell's fiscal events awfully much, although it is rarely all that keen on anyone's, but it could and would have lived with them all. It simply could not live with Kwarteng's only one, to the point of forcing first his removal from office and then Liz Truss's.

And nothing could suit British business better than a First Lord of Treasury with a profound understanding of, and close connections to, the rising peoples of Latin America, Asia and Africa, including the popularly elected President of more than 200 million Brazilians. That will never now be Corbyn, and he largely has himself to blame. But it does need to be someone, and soon.

Instead, though, Labour opportunistically pretended to oppose the abolition of the 45p rate of income tax, the only mini-Budget measure than had not been in Truss's prospectus to her party's membership, but it supported everything else that even Jeremy Hunt, of all people, has felt the need to reverse. Had the mini-Budget ever been put to a Commons Division, then Labour's whipped abstention would have saved Truss and Kwarteng from Hunt, Rishi Sunak, and all the rest of them. Labour is going into the next General Election as the only party that still thought that Trussonomics was broadly, and often very specifically, a good idea.

Starmer versus Truss could have resulted in a Labour overall majority, but Starmer versus Sunak will result in a hung Parliament. 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.