Take Back Control, Indeed

Let joy be unconfined that we were 0.1 per cent above recession in the last quarter for which data was available. Such a growth rate in any quarter of this year would meet the Government's own target. Levelling up? Levelling up of what?

Far from levelling up, the Teesside freeport is already an environmental disaster of the kind that destroys existing employment. Yet Rishi Sunak has been to see Nicola Sturgeon to sign off on two more, on the Firth of Forth and on the Cromarty Firth. Those are to be "green", apparently. That word is used to render any and everything respectable and even unquestionable.

With these freeports, the SNP yet again shows us what it really is. It always does, whether or not you choose to pay any attention. See also the Greens wherever they have any power; they are thoroughgoing warmongers in Germany. And the American Democrats. And our own dear Liberal Democrats. And the people who have been restored to their historic norm in control of the Labour Party.

Freeports are part of the programme of doing everything that the Blair Government could not get past the Labour Party in those days, although it would have had no trouble now. There must be some reason why the freeport areas needed to be quite so large. What do transnational corporations want with, for example, the whole of Dartmoor? It will be something, as we began to see with today's ban on wild camping there.

The fuss about this should not primarily be about birds or badgers, but about people. Privatisation has moved on from selling the family silver, to selling the family. And if past privatisations have been anything to go by, then the freeports will pass into the ownership of foreign states, as such. This is how wars start. In fact, the whole thing calls eerily to mind the Wagner Group's growing acquisition of its own territory from the rich mineral fields of Africa to the rich mineral fields of Ukraine.

Sunak has no intention of exercising the powers that he already has over Scotland. If there were going to be a section 35 order against the Gender Recognition Reform Bill, then it would have been made by now. That Bill is hugely unpopular in Scotland, so the only reason not to have made that order is agreement with the principle of the Bill, a principle that, across the public sector and its contractors, is already being put into effect throughout the United Kingdom, without the slightest reference to Parliament.

100 or fewer MPs would vote against gender self-identification, broadly in proportion to the House in party terms, but that is not the present point. Although it is a point worth making. As is the point that while the SNP had to contend with Alba on this issue, and Labour had to contend with various phenomena on the Left, if the Conservatives faced any challenge for their hitherto core vote, then it was from Reform, which has no identifiable policy here.

Over on the other side, Keir Starmer has been to Belfast to warn against a "Brexit purity cult", because for him it is all about management, and he has to give the Rejoiners something now that Sadiq Khan is on manoeuvres, just as Starmer himself was when he destroyed Jeremy Corbyn by reference to Brexit. No one with Philip North's pro-Corbyn record would ever now be appointed to the House of Lords by the Labour Party. Thank God for the Bench of Bishops. Although they are the most orthodox since the War, the soft orthodoxy of most of that Bench's present occupants translates into their Soft Left politics. Hard orthodoxy translates into this.

Khan might more usefully be making himself the voice of the 12 or more firefighters from Grenfell Tower, and of who knows how many other people besides, who had incurable cancers from the flammable cladding, banned in the United States, that Kensington and Chelsea Council had kept on that building so as not to spoil the view for the rich neighbours. When local GPs began reporting "the Grenfell cough", then the Government called them liars. Is either Khan or Starmer talking about that? No, of course not.

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. 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.