Autumn Statement

As we count down the hours, remember that there was not a word of this six weeks ago. It has nothing to do with Brexit. It has nothing to do with Ukraine, which has just bombed a NATO member state. It has nothing to do with Covid-19, or with any response to that. No, between the mini-Budget and Liz Truss's resignation, there were 30 days, and each of them has cost the country at least one billion pounds.

The people who have been allowed to present themselves as the only true economic thinkers for as long as I can remember, took all of one month to destroy the British economy. Yet they are no more being drummed out of public life than the supporters of the Iraq War were.

Unlike the warmongers, though, they are at least out of government. For now. Today, we shall see eye-watering tax increases, swingeing spending cuts, and all the attendant misery. But that was par for the course from 2010 to 2016, it has never entirely gone away, and Labour in 2010 proposed greater austerity than came to pass.

Now, however, having opportunistically pretended to have opposed the only mini-Budget measure that had not been in Truss's pitch to the Conservative membership, the abolition of the 45p rate of income tax, Labour is stuck with its support for all of the others. If you still think that Trussonomics was a good idea, then vote Labour.

Like the Liberal Democrats since their foundation in 1988, Labour since 1995 has been constitutionally committed to what we now see has inevitably ended up as Trussonomics, as also to what has come to be recognised universally as the neoconservative foreign policy that it has always been. Being purely and simply a vehicle for securing power, the Conservative Party carries no such baggage.

We are heading for 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.