On The Run

Guardian readers are not permitted to comment on Rachel Reeves's offering, but are able to do so on John McDonnell's. He rightly reminds us that while he and Jeremy Corbyn were derided for exploring the possibility that their policies might have led to a run on the pound, Kwasi Kwarteng and Liz Truss had obviously never even considered it.

In reality, as McDonnell details, the City did not like many of his and Corbyn's agenda, voted against them, and gave plenty of money to the other side, but had those agenda become Government policy, then the City would have factored them in, because that is what it does.

If it can. Kwarteng's and Truss's programme is already demonstrably incapable of being worked with, in, within, or even around. We are governed by people whose fixed ideological presuppositions led them to thoroughly unsuccessful careers in the field for which they have purported to speak ever since that failure spurred them into the full-time politics that they were always going to take up eventually. They remain sincerely unable to comprehend that, having finally been put into practice, everything in which they have always believed has turned to have been an unmitigated disaster in its own terms.

But what is the alternative? Reeves, Keir Starmer, and the rest of those who refuse to stand on picket lines while insisting that the International Monetary Fund can say or do no wrong. 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 in the next Parliament. 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.