Why The Strikes Must Prevail

We never voted for these "independent" pay review bodies, which are in fact appointed by the Ministers who set their terms of reference, any more than we voted for the Bank of England to which Labour farmed out monetary policy without a manifesto commitment, or for the Office for Budgetary Responsibility that the Liberal Democrats decreed into existence, or for the Economic Advisory Council that Jeremy Hunt has created out of thin air.

On none of those occasions have the salaries of the First Lord of the Treasury, of all other Treasury Ministers, and of all senior Treasury civil servants, been halved, as in each of those cases they should have been. Likewise, if Ministers are not going to set the rates of pay in their areas of responsibility, then their own pay ought to be reduced accordingly. Better still, those Ministers should indeed set those rates, accountable to Parliament.

The trade unions are winning pay rises at or above the rate of inflation all over the private sector. But half of your exorbitant rail fare is profit to a contractor that the Government undertakes to pay whatever that contractor, usually foreign and often a foreign state, feels like charging, while the Royal Mail, which no one seems to grasp is now a private company because the only thing more bizarre than that is the fact that it is now separate from the Post Office, has flipped from recording a £750 million profit to a £250 million loss rather than pay its staff fairly. And that is before we even start about unambiguously public provision such as the National Health Service.

Michelle Mone, the VIP lane in general, all sorts of other things from the last lockdowns to date but not forever, however much money we are really spending to be beaten in Ukraine by a private company that actively recruits the lowest of the low: of course we could afford this, even before we mentioned that a sovereign state with its own free floating, fiat currency had as much of that currency as it chose to issue to itself, with readily available fiscal and monetary means of controlling any inflationary effect. Those means therefore require to be under democratic political control.

If a minimum service level were to be defined in, say, the NHS, less than everything that it did anyway, then why should the State pay for anything above that minimum? If companies were empowered to sue unions over strikes, then how would their directors not have a fiduciary duty to do so? And so on, and on, and on, and on, and on.

Not a word of this will come from the Official Opposition. If you believe that it would repeal the latest round of anti-union legislation, then I have some magic beans to sell you. In her £700 dress, Rachel Reeves parrots Trussonomics, even talking about "growing the pie", while entirely falsely claiming that the last two Labour manifestos had been uncosted and that Jeremy Corbyn had left the party in deficit.

Dan Jarvis, Yvette Cooper and Wes Streeting are paid by MPM Connect, which has no employees and which gives its accountant's office as its address. In any case, no private company does or should make political donations. It makes investments, on which it rightly expects a return. Only unions give money to politicians for the privilege of being ignored or abused. Fans of either Keir Starmer or Just Stop Oil should ponder that the same people give big money to both of them.

Funded by private healthcare, Streeting wants to give public money to that interest rather than, you know, to the NHS. Once anything had gone, then try getting it back, and be in no doubt that we would indeed end up having to pay upfront for it. Of course, Streeting knows that. By they way, we all took it as read that Rishi Sunak went private, but if the defence is that that frees up NHS provision, then that is factually not the case. The doctor who will see you practically immediately for a fee and the doctor who cannot see you for months are the same doctor, having been trained up to consultant level entirely by the NHS. There are also serious questions about the lines of accountability in private medical facilities when things go wrong.

Sunak's declared plan for more of that instead of the NHS was made politically possible by the fact that Streeting had already announced it, meaning that there would be no Official Opposition to it. Labour is now endorsed by Jeremy Clarkson, who is close to David Cameron, as well as by Austerity Coalition stalwarts such as Anna Soubry, Ken Clarke, Claire Perry O'Neill, and the bet-hedging George Osborne, whose long-time Chief of Staff and then Evening Standard employee, Rupert Harrison, is on the Economic Advisory Council.

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. In the meantime, victory to the striking workers.