Stimulating Growth

If every supporter of Liz Truss in the House of Commons left the Conservative Party, then it would still have an overall majority. If every such supporter in the country did so, then that would do it no harm.

If late Queen had died a week earlier, or if the Conservative Leadership Election had gone on a week longer, then there is no reason to assume that the King would have honoured a private club's imposition of a Prime Minister with the support of only one thirteenth of the House of Commons. The other twelve thirteenths having been spectacularly vindicated by events, the matter now passes to that House.

Under Boris Johnson, the Conservatives were merely a standard midterm four points behind. But of course no party would ever win a General Election by 33 points. And even if Labour did win the next General Election, then it would only revert to the policies that it had last pursued in office, when in all of one year was the top rate of income tax higher than 40 pence in the pound, and to the policies that it advocated in the Coalition of years of pro-austerity and pro-war consensus between the two frontbenches, a consensus from which most Labour MPs and all Labour staffers have never deviated.

We know what the consequences of those policies would be. Neither the war in Ukraine, nor anything to do with Covid-19, was the reason why there were found to be 14 million poor people in Britain in 2018, more than one in five of the population, although even when discussing that finding no media outlet was able to find a poor person to speak. Those phenomena, both the mass poverty itself and the silencing of the poor, were many years old even then. But now that their causes are affecting the lives of people who are not supposed to be poor, and who are therefore allowed a voice, then there is a "Cost of Living Crisis".

To be blamed on the war in Ukraine, just as anyone who questions anything is now accused of being a stooge of Russia. Even if that were true, which it is not, then you know perfectly well that you would not and should not be willing to starve or freeze to death in the dark for the sake of whether Luhansk, Donestsk, Zaporizhzhia or Kherson should be in Russia or in Ukraine, never mind in Vladimir Putin's Russia or in the Azov Battalion's Ukraine, with its ruthless suppression of free media, of trade unions, and of opposition parties.

The voting figures are eyebrow-raising, although no one has a problem with them in Gibraltar or in the Falkland Islands, and they would be impossible to stage unless there were a healthy majority in any case. The largely Ukrainian Soviet elite put the areas that have just voted into the Ukrainian SSR in order to make its independence impossible. That happened at the same time as the creation of Northern Ireland, but at least that enjoyed the support of the majority of its population. In the way that Orangemen would not like Great Britain if they moved here, the Russian Federation will find it difficult to assimilate the economically and culturally Soviet lands of Novorossiya. As also of Transnistria, if it ever came to that. But here we are.

Are you prepared to go hungry in the cold for any of this? Of course you are not. Nor should you be. You should not be prepared to go hungry in the cold at all. 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 in the next Parliament. 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.