Shocked And A Bit Excited

Openly calling for the resignation of Xi Jinping is notable and even brave, although I expect that he will survive, and they are not saying who or what they would want instead. But the demonstrations in China are extremely small for the size of the country, or indeed of the cities in question, and they are not especially unusual there.

Yet they could no longer legally happen here. Under the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act, which Labour barely opposed and has no policy of repealing, they could land you in prison for 10 years. Just wait for it to be joined on the Statute Book by the Public Order Bill, which is also being given only the most Official of Opposition.

If you doubted quite how much a part of the Establishment Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil were, then consider that they were not being hauled off to be sentenced to 10-year stretches. Will striking workers be so indulged? Yet strikes are not performative. Even in themselves, without any picketing, they entail a loss of pay. No one submits to that purely to make a point.

The cost of living crisis is nothing new to at least 14.5 million people in Britain, who have been experiencing it unremittingly for 12 years or more, and in some cases for 40. It is news because it has come to affect people are not just expected to be poor and to suck it up. Notice that it is only those suddenly new poor who are ever asked about it. Still, at least it is now being discussed at all.

If, for example, it would take a 19 per cent increase to bring nurses' pay up to the level at which it would have stood if it had kept pace with inflation since 2010, then that is the fault of the people who have been government during that period, a period during which MPs have enjoyed nine increases in pay.

There was no war in Ukraine in 2010. There was no Covid-19. There was no Brexit. Neither the crisis in Ukraine, nor the recent pandemic, has been experienced solely by the United Kingdom. European Union membership has never extended to most of the countries in the world, nor to one third of the countries in the OECD, nor to three quarters of the countries in the G20.

Existing economic problems are being exacerbated by the sanctions against Russia, and by the vast diversion of money and resources to the likes of the Kraken Regiment that it is tellingly now permissible to mention. But the anti-lockdown monomaniacs and the anti-Brexit monomaniacs are mirror images of each other.

For the sake of what they regarded as their natural inferiors, they were once mildly inconvenienced for the first time in their lives, and they are determined to bang on about it until the day they died. Predict that the thing that you disliked would lead to every conceivable form of doom and gloom, and whenever one of those arrived eventually, then you could always claim to have been vindicated. Here we are.

Impoverishment had long been inflicted on many millions of their fellow-citizens by their preferred policies, and not least by the requirements of membership of Margaret Thatcher's Single Market and of the Customs Union, as well as by the support for austerity on the part of the Labour Party until 2015 and again now, most of its MPs and all of its staff continuously, the Liberal Democrats, the SNP, and all parties in Northern Ireland, including the one that was now selling itself as potentially an anti-austerity Government in the Irish Republic.

That impoverishment has been visited on its previous enthusiasts, who still believe that its longstanding victims deserve it, by the chaos that ensued from the mere announcement of an intention to implement the economic programme that had been promised by their favoured candidate for Prime Minister. At 45, the effects will define the background, and often the foreground, of the rest of my life.

None of Jeremy Hunt's measures was being suggested by anyone at the moment that Kwasi Kwarteng stood up to deliver the mini-Budget, when Ukraine was old news, when Covid-19 was very old news, and when Brexit was practically prehistoric. Those measures have nothing to do 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.

Labour at least pretends to believe that there is a "fiscal black hole", because it wants the consequences. It does nothing to challenge 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.

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, in the spirit of every Labour Budget from December 1976 onwards.

Having opportunistically pretended to have opposed the abolition of the 45p rate of income tax, Labour is stuck with its support for all of the other mini-Budget measures. If you still think that Trussonomics was a good idea, then vote Labour. Like the Lib Dems 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.

So hope springs eternal. While our media were obsessed with a few hundred bored youths in Beijing and Shanghai, the voters of Taiwan were rejecting the rattlers of other countries' sabres so comprehensively that Tsai Ing-wen has resigned as the Leader of her party. The Kuomintang brings its own issues, but the war that was never on is well and truly off for anything like the foreseeable future. Nancy Pelosi is going to have to find an alternative source of income in retirement. Regime change, indeed.

If it can be done there, then it can be done here. Look at Keir Starmer's tragicomic transition from the man whose red line was saving freedom of movement, to the man whose red line is preventing any return to freedom of movement, which in any case does not mean what most people in Britain thinks that it means.

Being an EU citizen has never conferred an absolute right to live in any EU member state of your choosing. Britain chose to apply it like that because it had chosen an economic model that depended on mass immigration, the model to which the CBI wants to return. Truss's and Kwarteng's model openly depended on that, too. Logically, so does Hunt's and Rishi Sunak's. And so would Starmer's.

The broad electorate is waking up to the fact that you cannot believe a word that Starmer says, because nor does he. There are two years to go before the next General Election. 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.