A Flagrant Attack OF Democracy

20 years ago today, Jeremy Corbyn pointed out to the largest demonstration in British history that even the Daily Mail had printed a route map for its readers who were in attendance. He did not just appear out of thin air 12 years later. Nor will he be disappearing in a puff of smoke nine years after that.

No one who was trying to get on in either main party would want a CV that included having come fourth or below in an English seat, while as "Corbyn without the baggage", Christian Wolmar would presumably be refused ratification by the National Executive Committee as the Labour Party's candidate at Islington North. There will be a candidate, but no one worth mentioning. Then again, Ed Balls has been shooting his mouth off. Either he will stand against Corbyn, or he should shut up.

To save face, Labour will bang on that Corbyn was some sort of made man of Hamas, Hezbollah, the IRA, and now no doubt of the Wagner Group and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps as well, so that no "moderate" Labour supporter of NHS privatisation and of Itamar Ben-Gvir "would dare" risk life and limb by putting up against him. Nothing to do with the guaranteed electoral humiliation, then. The whole story will be negated by the fact that there was indeed a Labour candidate, but an utterly undistinguished one, including Twinkle Toes.

Balls is supposedly an economic genius, but just as the City had never stopped wargaming the outside possibility of a left-wing Labour Government, so that it had been fully primed for a McDonnell Budget without ever having considered any prospect so absurd as Liz Truss's and Kwasi Kwarteng's proposals, so Corbynomics was the nearest thing in recent decades to an academically respectable political programme for the management of the British economy, uniquely receiving any endorsement worth mentioning from academic economists such as here, here, and in the person of Professor Robert Skidelsky, who was an already ennobled Fellow of the British Academy.

Yet while Labour opportunistically pretended to oppose the abolition of the 45p rate of income tax, the only mini-Budget measure than had not been in Truss's prospectus to her party's membership, it supported everything else that even Jeremy Hunt, of all people, has felt the need to reverse. Had the mini-Budget ever been put to a Commons Division, then Labour's whipped abstention would have saved Truss and Kwarteng from Hunt, Rishi Sunak, and all the rest of them. Labour is going into the next General Election as the only party that still thought that Trussonomics was broadly, and often very specifically, a good idea. While there is no reason to want a Starmer Government, the closest thing would be the desire to see it brought down by the same forces that had brought down Truss, and on the same grounds.

But when I say that there is going to be a hung Parliament, then you can take that to the bank. I spent the 2005 Parliament saying that it was psephologically impossible for the Heir to Blair's Conservative Party to win an overall majority. I predicted a hung Parliament on the day that the 2017 General Election was called, and I stuck to that, entirely alone, all the way up to the publication of the exit poll eight long weeks later. And on the day that Sunak became Prime Minister, I predicted that a General Election between him and Starmer would result in a hung Parliament.

The opinion polls bear no resemblance to real votes cast. Last week, there was crowing about the swing to Labour at West Lancashire, but that did not mean that more people had voted Labour. On the contrary, even since the last General Election, the Labour vote there had halved. Halved. It has gone through the floor at all but one by-election since Starmer became Leader, with one of those recording Labour's lowest ever share of the vote. Council seats that were held or won under Corbyn have fallen like sandcastles, taking control of major local authorities with them. That is the bread and butter of the party's right wing, who are not otherwise the most employable of people.

Starmer's personal rating is negative not only nationally, but in every region apart from London, and it is still in decline. 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. Corbyn has many failings, but he would be 80 by the time of the 2029 Election, so his return one last time at Islington North would nevertheless be fundamental to the emergence of what needed to come next.