Beyond The Black Hole

Eight weeks ago today, on 23rd September 2022, the war in Ukraine was old news, everything to do with Covid-19 was very old news, Brexit was practically prehistoric, and I awoke to find myself halfway to 90. A few hours later, the Chancellor of the Exchequer crashed the British economy. The effects of that will define the background, and often the foreground, of the rest of my life, even if it is not yet halfway through.

None of yesterday's measures was being suggested by anyone at the moment that Kwasi Kwarteng stood up to deliver the mini-Budget. Those measures have nothing to with Brexit, or with the lockdowns, or with Ukraine, or with anything other than the catastrophic attempt, 40 and more years in the planning, to implement the lunatic economic ideology to which Kwarteng and Liz Truss subscribed.

Blame attaches solely to Kwarteng, to Truss, to the mere one in 13 MPs who ever wanted her to become Prime Minister, to the barely more voters than one parliamentary constituency who gave her the job, to the media outlets who told them what to think, and to the think tanks that told everyone else in this sorry little tale what to think.

Astonishingly, and yet not, a mainstay of that think tank circuit was back on the Question Time panel last night, as if nothing had happened. We have already been here for nearly 20 years, with the unflushable advocates of the invasion of Iraq, the disastrous effects of which will, again, continue to unfold for the rest of all of our lives.

Labour at least pretends to believe that there is a "fiscal black hole", because it wants the consequences, just as it pretended to believe that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, because it wanted the consequences. It does nothing to challenge Jeremy Hunt's illiterate assertion that a sovereign state's budget worked like a household budget, and possibly does not even know that that is factually incorrect.

People are saying that this Autumn Statement was both a reversion to the austerity of the Coalition, and Brownite, "the first Labour Budget in years". Quite. Labour promised even more austerity in 2010 than the Coalition ended up delivering, and it did not oppose the austerity programme in 2015. Most Labour MPs and all Labour Party staffers remained fanatically pro-austerity even after the Government had changed direction, and that has never ceased to be the case. This would not have been an Autumn Statement that John McDonnell would have delivered, but it was firmly continuous with every Labour Budget that there had actually been from December 1976 onwards.

Like the Liberal Democrats since their foundation in 1988, Labour since 1995 has been constitutionally committed to all of this. Being purely and simply a vehicle for securing power, the Conservative Party carries no such baggage. 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.

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.