Slipping Back?

The Centre for Social Justice was founded by Iain Duncan Smith, who ended up resigning because he could no longer go along with policies that, as continuations of Yvette Copper’s, had been so acceptable to Harriet Harman that the failure to oppose them had made Jeremy Corbyn Leader of the Labour Party. Look at it now:

The UK is in danger of slipping back into a Victorian-age gap between mainstream society and an impoverished underclass, a report has warned.

Some 13.4 million people lead lives marred by family fragility, stagnant wages, poor housing, chronic ill health and crime, according to the Centre for Social Justice.

The CSJ’s report - Two Nations: The State Of Poverty In The UK - argues that the most disadvantaged in Britain are no better off than 15 years ago, at the time of the financial crash, and cites evidence that switching from welfare to work isn't worth it for them.

Yet what are we offered instead? The Labour Party proposes a minimum wage of £10 per hour, which would be a cut. The Labour Party would “hold the door open” to the privatisation of the National Health Service, although tellingly only in England, having taken money from the American private healthcare companies that supplied the NHS with contaminated blood products.

The Labour Party will not oppose the Government’s plan to deny free prescriptions and free dental care to benefit claimants, a change that will not find anyone a job, and Labour is instead looking at withdrawing such provision from pensioners as well; again, only England has prescription charges.

The Labour Party not only supports banning three quarters of the population from being able to bring a foreign spouse to live in Britain, but it wants to set the income threshold even higher. And while the Government abstained when, but for an American veto, the United Nations Security Council otherwise voted unanimously for a ceasefire in Gaza and for the release of all hostages, a Labour Government would have voted against that motion.

Labour is now the greater evil, worse than the Tories. We should no more want it to win the next General Election than most of its MPs wanted it to win the last two, or than any of its staff wanted it to win the last four.

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 Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister, I predicted that a General Election between him and Keir 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.