Before Disruption Begins

Another workaday working week begins in Britain. It turns out that last July, a man was made Chancellor of the Exchequer in the full knowledge had he had committed tax fraud to the tune of somewhere between three million and four million pounds. He remains in the Cabinet. He is supposed to be paying back at least part of the money, although believe that when you see it. Apparently, that will be the end of the matter. No one who officially exists seems to think that this is any kind of story. Perhaps the story is that this is not one?

The jaw-dropping Public Order Bill is to be amended to enable the Police, who have not asked for this new power, to stop protests before they had started. We are not talking about riots here. The existing powers have already been used against walking slowly, praying silently, and holding up blank sheets of paper. This comes on the same day as David Carrick has been convicted of 49 sexual offences including 24 rapes, itself on the same day as there have turned out to be 979 Police Officers, with a plan for seven per cent more, carrying out strip searches and so forth from their base in schools with high numbers of working-class and politically black pupils.

Not that you would find many of those in Insulate Britain, Extinction Rebellion or Just Stop Oil, the last, at least, funded by the same people who funded Keir Starmer. But that is why these powers would not in fact be used against those phenomena, which are rather oddly demonstrating in favour of the policies of their purported targets in the Government and in the corporations with which it has effectively merged, and which therefore manage to gain easy access to premises that are policed within an inch of their lives. To put matters at their very mildest, real protesters would not be able to do that. There is no Labour policy to repeal this or any other part of what would then be the Public Order Act. There would be if it targeted Starmer's investors.

And speaking of Starmer, he wants us to self-diagnose which hospital specialist we needed to see for our back pain, or for what he turns out to have meant to be the blood in our stools, without reference to the GPs whom he nevertheless wanted to make direct employees of the State even as he privatised the hospitals. This country has recently had a major public health emergency, and it is not yet fully over. That needs to inform the choice of Prime Minister. Starmer fails the test.

But Starmer's dishonesty is becoming a story. He lied to his party members to get their votes, so he would lie to anyone else to get their votes. He wants the votes of people who could afford to pay for healthcare. He would not want the Red Wall even if we wanted him. But his own base is that section of the liberal bourgeoisie which would seldom or never vote Conservative, and nothing matters more to that than the free undergraduate tuition on which he has reneged.

We are heading for 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.