Bonded Labour

They thought that first Boris Johnson and then Liz Truss ought to have been Prime Minister, and now they have their knives out for the Office for Budget Responsibility. But even a stopped clock. Just as we never voted for the "independent" pay review bodies that are in fact appointed by the Ministers who set their terms of reference, so we never voted for the Bank of England to which Labour farmed out monetary policy without a manifesto commitment, or for the OBR that the Liberal Democrats decreed into existence, or for the Economic Advisory Council that Jeremy Hunt has created out of thin air.

On none of those occasions have the salaries of the First Lord of the Treasury, of all other Treasury Ministers, and of all senior Treasury civil servants, been halved, as in each of those cases they should have been. Likewise, if Ministers are not going to set the rates of pay in their areas of responsibility, then their own pay ought to be reduced accordingly. Better still, those Ministers should indeed set those rates, accountable to Parliament, just as the Chancellor of the Exchequer should again set interest rates, accountable to Parliament.

If there is an Economic Advisory Council, then what is the Treasury for? And look who is on it. BlackRock's Rupert Harrison was George Osborne's long-time Chief of Staff and then Evening Standard employee, while Osborne, Philip Hammond and Sajid Javid are also all advising Jeremy Hunt. Imperial protectorates and Indian princely states had British advisers whose advice had to be taken, and our nominally sovereign little colony of BlackRock and JP Morgan is in much the same position.

BlackRock is throwing its weight around, threatening to activate the bond markets if there were General Election taxation or spending pledges that were not to its liking. But it is pushing at an open door with Labour. Harrison has been selected as the Conservative candidate for Bicester and Woodstock. Yet even if Harrison were a sitting Conservative MP, would Rachel Reeves remove him from the Economic Advisory Council? Merely to ask that question answers it.

Reeves struggles to subsist on her declared income last year of £353,100, confiding that, "What makes me wince is when I look at my bank statement, and I find that the money coming in is increasingly short of the money going out." The bank took away my overdraft facility because I was not using it. I now cannot go into the red. I am not complaining, I just think that that makes me better qualified than Reeves to be Chancellor of the Exchequer.

And 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.