Within The Hour

Within the hour, Anneliese Dodds will formally announce that the Labour Party's economic policy was now to oppose the Government from well to its right where necessary, but otherwise just to go along with it. All three parties believe in permanent austerity in principle, and any difference is over when to return to that ideal. Of course, everyone has already known this. And Labour is four points behind the worst Government ever.

Who is going to vote Labour in 2024? Rejoiners have the Liberal Democrats, and they know that that party has none of Labour's, or indeed the Conservatives', factional differences on the issue. Those whose priority is zero carbon emissions and general Malthusian anti-industrialism have the Greens, or indeed the Conservatives.

Keir Starmer is everything that the Red Wall had disliked by 2019, but none of the things that it had liked in 2017. There will be mass abstention, or support for locally organised alternatives, in the BAME communities that are now to be found in every ward, and which turned out twice in enormous numbers for Jeremy Corbyn, but to whom Starmer is the most toxic frontline politician since Enoch Powell.

I have opposed the austerity programme from the very start. Therefore, I voted Leave for the reasons of the people who cast the decisive votes for Brexit. I am anything but an anti-industrial Malthusian; quite the reverse, in fact. By 2024, I shall have been politically active for 30 years in what has come to be seen as the archetypal Red Wall constituency, where I have lived since 1982. I am BAME enough, and I have been made conscious of being politically black by the concerted efforts of the Labour Right and of its enforcement agency, the Crown Prosecution Service. And I am the Independent parliamentary candidate for North West Durham.