Tired and Chaotic?

Kate Osamor now has the Labour whip with Natalie Elphicke but not with Jeremy Corbyn or Diane Abbott. After Elphicke, they had to give it back to someone on the Left, but it could not have been either of those of whom most people had heard. Shame on Osamor for saying yes.

In 2021, Elphicke was one of three Conservative MPs who were suspended for a day, with another two ordered to apologise to the House, because they had tried to influence the judge in the trial of her then husband, and constituency predecessor, Charlie Elphicke. A former Director of Public Prosecutions welcomes such a person to the Parliamentary Labour Party. Expect his Government to be characterised by such lawless bullying of independent institutions. No one does that quite like the Labour Right. Elphicke should fit right in.

Labour is now the party of absolutely anyone who subscribes to neoconservative foreign policy, no matter what else, if anything, they might happen to think. Neoconservative foreign policy depends on neoliberal economic policy, and is therefore incompatible with the democratic socialism that the Labour Party professes in its constitution, and therefore on Elphicke's new membership card, although conveniently without defining it. If you doubt that incompatibility, then recall the last Labour Government.

Asked on Radio Four yesterday whether she was a socialist, Rachel Reeves replied, "I'm a social democrat", but that turned out to mean the position of Nick Boles, which is easily deduced from the many publications of Policy Exchange and from Boles's own record as a Minister under David Cameron. That rules out those of us who believe in securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends. Although wherever possible some of us have always avoided such terminology as a divisive distraction, all of us used to call that social democracy or democratic socialism depending on the audience. But if the former is now Boles and the latter is now Elphicke, then what are we to call our position when we did have to put a label on it?

Since the monetarist Labour Budget of December 1976, a single political project has governed Britain. All three parties have been in office, but changes of party have been imperceptible from the policies alone. In government, each side has done exactly as the other side would have done if it had stayed in government. It is irrelevant who was the Leader of the Opposition at any given time. A Foot or even a Kinnock Government might have been politically different from Thatcher or Major, but a Callaghan, Healey or Hattersley Government would not have been. A Corbyn, or to an extent even an Ed Miliband, Government might have been politically different from Cameron, May or Johnson, but a Brown and then a Balls or a David Miliband Government would not have been.

William Hague and Michael Howard did not even pretend that they would have been politically different from Tony Blair, and a Government in which John Major had held on until he had felt like handing over to Ken Clarke certainly would not have been on anything apart for hereditary peers and foxhunting. In 2005 and 2010, with everything else going on in Britain and the world, one third of such people as campaigned for the Conservative Party did so only on the issue of foxhunting. That passed for politics when I was in my twenties and early thirties. Here we are again. Complete with Peter Mandelson.

Mandelson is never asked about his two separate resignations for corruption or about his very close friendship with the world's most notorious sex trafficker, who improbably committed suicide in an American supermax cell. I carry no candle for the Greens, but are they prepared to do what no one else apart from George Galloway will, and hit back at Mandelson? 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.

I have no plan to join the Workers Party of Britain, although nor would I expect to stand against it. But if it did not contest North Durham, then I would. 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. But there does need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not. We have made a start.