Shortage Occupation

Never mind anything about immigration. You have heard it all before, and anyway it is not very popular. Labour contested the 2015 General Election on a more restrictionist programme than the Conservatives did, and what happened then? Boris Johnson was the most pro-immigration Prime Minister ever, and he won an overall majority of 80. No, today’s Government speech that mattered was delivered by Jeremy Hunt, who blamed Brexit for absolutely everything. When you vote Conservative next year, as you know that you will, then you will indeed be voting for David Cameron for the third time in 14 years. Or, if you were one of two thirds of that party’s members in 2005, for the fourth time in a remarkable 19 years.

If you disagreed with Cameron about anything, then it would be about Gaza, on which you would therefore be in agreement with Keir Starmer. But it will be Cameron, Hunt, and clearly Rishi Sunak after all, who will be in agreement with Margaret Thatcher on the EU. By the nature of the condition, she must already have had dementia by the time of the extremely late Bruges speech. It bore no resemblance to what was by then her 40-year record on the issue.

The basis of the lockdowns was the Public Health (Control of Disease) Act 1984. Who was the Prime Minister in 1984? The Single European Act, the Anglo-Irish Agreement, the Exchange Rate Mechanism, the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, the Children Act, the replacement of O-levels with GCSEs, the destruction of the economic basis of paternal authority in the stockades of male employment, the massively increased benefit dependency, the rise of Political Correctness, the general moral chaos of the 1980s, the legalisation of abortion up to birth, the fight against Victoria Gillick, and all of that is just the start. Even the people who love Thatcher can see why the people who hate her do so; they just do not agree. But why the people who love her do so is, in their own terms, a complete mystery.

Likewise, was she “the Iron Lady” when, in early 1981, her initial pit closure programme was abandoned within two days of a walkout by the miners? Was she “the Iron Lady” when she had one of her closest allies, Nicholas Ridley, negotiate a transfer of sovereignty over the Falkland Islands to Argentina, to be followed by a leaseback arrangement, until the Islanders, the Labour Party and Conservative backbenchers forced her to back down? Was she “the Iron Lady” when, within a few months of election on clear commitments with regard to Rhodesia, she simply abandoned them at the Commonwealth Conference in Lusaka? Was she “the Iron Lady” when, having claimed that Britain would never give up Hong Kong, she took barely 24 hours to return to Planet Earth and effect a complete U-turn? Was she “the Iron Lady” when she took just as little time to move from public opposition to public support of Spanish accession to the Western European Union? Was she “the Iron Lady” when she gave up monetarism completely during her second term? And so on.

There have been 15 Leaders of the Conservative Party since the War, and beyond shareholding, or being married to businessmen, none of them has had any business background worth mentioning, if at all. They have had stopgap jobs and what have you, but nothing more than that, and not even that in some cases. Nearly half have been beneficiaries of the massive public subsidies to landowning. Winston Churchill, toff. Anthony Eden, toff. Harold Macmillan, toff enough. Alec Douglas-Home, toffee toffee toff toff. Ted Heath, full-time politician since university. Thatcher, millionaire’s wife. John Major, full-time politician all his adult life.

William Hague, full-time politician since childhood. Iain Duncan Smith, paid by the Army to go away. Michael Howard, full-time politician since university, more than 40 years earlier. Cameron, toff. Theresa May, millionaire’s wife. Johnson, unaccomplished, semi-aristocratic Classicist whom none of his hearers at the CBI would have employed even before he had extolled to them the virtues of Peppa Pig World. Liz Truss, failed at Shell, and then unemployed for several years before a sinecure at a thinktank enabled her to sleep her way into Parliament. Sunak, briefly at Goldman Sachs before he became the full-time son-in-law of a foreign gazillionaire. They have no more made a living the hard way than Starmer ever has.

But when I tell you that there is going to be a hung Parliament, then you can take that to the bank. I spent the 2005 Parliament saying that it was psephologically impossible for the Heir to Blair’s Conservative Party to win an overall majority. I predicted a hung Parliament on the day that the 2017 General Election was called, and I stuck to that, entirely alone, all the way up to the publication of the exit poll eight long weeks later. And on the day that Sunak became Prime Minister, I predicted that a General Election between him and Starmer would result 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.