Just Keep Going

Strike fear into your heart by merely reading the words, "Liz Truss's Resignation Honours List." And put in Boris Johnson or whoever you pleased, but the forces that brought down Truss, and which brought down Johnson the last time, are determined to have Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt as Prime Minister and as Chancellor of the Exchequer, in either order. They would just keep going until they had got it.

You thought that, if the spooks and the securocrats had not got there first, then a Corbyn Government would have been brought down by the City, the money markets, the Bank of England, the Office for Budgetary Responsibility, the International Monetary Fund, and the President of the United States. Perhaps it would have been. But it would have planned for the attack. To your mind, what has just happened has been as if a Corbyn Government had been brought down by the unions in a General Strike.

This week's TUC has made it clear how much trouble a left-wing Government might expect from important sections of the union bureaucracy. But everyone on the Left has always known that. We have all been trade unionists forever. The Hard Right think tank circuit, on the other hand, is full of people who either failed in the City, or have never been anywhere near it.

And here we are. The existing rates of income tax can never come down, nor will the rate of corporation tax ever be able to do so once its impending increase had come into effect. Now we need to reframe the debate away from tax for austerity and towards tax for investment, since the tax is going to be levied no matter who was in office. For that, we are going to have to get rid of Keir Starmer, Rachel Reeves, Wes Streeting, Yvette Cooper, and all that trash.

Starmer versus Truss could have ended in a Labour landslide, but Starmer versus any other Conservative Leader will end 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.

Here at North West Durham, the process of selecting a Labour parliamentary candidate has still not begun. The Constituency Labour Party posts Facebook photographs of its "campaigning", but that campaigning is on behalf of no one. It is purely performative, and for the sake of the pub afterwards, like an historical reenactment society. I am quoting from memory, but his sympathetic biographer, Humphrey Carpenter, said something to the effect that JRR Tolkien's writing did not belong to the world of literature and the arts, but to the world of people who did things with model railways in their sheds. Make of that what you will, but dear though some of the stalwarts have been to me for 30 years, North West Durham Constituency Labour Party no longer belongs to the world of politics, but to the world of people who do things with model railways in their sheds.