Of Interest

Without a manifesto commitment, Labour farmed out monetary policy. The Liberal Democrats forced the creation of the Office for Budget Responsibility. On their own initiative, the Conservatives have created the Economic Advisory Council out of thin air. Yet 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.

If there is an Economic Advisory Council, then what is the Treasury for? And look who is on it. Imperial protectorates and Indian princely states had British advisers whose advice had to be taken, and our nominally sovereign little colony of BlackRock and JP Morgan is in much the same position. 

Rupert Harrison was George Osborne's long-time Chief of Staff and then Evening Standard employee, while Osborne, Philip Hammond and Sajid Javid are also all advising Jeremy Hunt. They all knew what some of us have been trying to tell you all along about cryptocurrencies, because they all know perfectly well that a sovereign state with its own free floating, fiat currency has as much of that currency as it chooses to issue to itself, with readily available fiscal and monetary means of controlling any inflationary effect, means that therefore require to be under democratic political control. They just refuse to do it.

Instead, they send British Steel to the Great Wall of China. Instead, they give us Shell's obscene profiteering while paying no tax in the United Kingdom for the last five years, in each of which it has invested eight million pounds in the Conservative Party. Instead, they give us the huge impending increase in water bills while refusing to act against the dumping of sewage into the water supply.

Instead, they give us the merger of state and corporate power to the point of physical violence, and there is a word for that, in the form of the compulsory granting of warrants to British Gas to enter people's homes and install prepayment meters, a service for which Centrica paid what was euphemistically described as a fee on each of the hundreds or thousands of occasions at a time that it applied online, with the warrants themselves issued over the telephone.

Instead, they hope that we will not notice that the only major economy that was expected to go into recession in 2023 was also the only one that had no cap on bankers' bonuses. Instead, they give us a Prime Minister who does not know whether or not he is a billionaire, and who refuses to confirm whether or not his wife has given up her non-domiciled tax status. Instead, they give us Javid's history as a non-dom. Instead, they give us Nadhim Zahawi. Instead, they give us Michelle Mone. 

Instead, they give us the expenditure of more on fighting the rail strike than it would have taken to have settled it on the unions' term. Instead, they give us the offer to firefighters of one thousand pounds per shift to break the strike. Instead, they give us the lie that the highest possible salary for a state-funded classroom teacher is the "average", although it is still less than the annual fees for Winchester, which are £1180 higher than the highest possible in Inner London, and £7126 higher than the highest possible either anywhere in England outside London, or anywhere at all in Wales.

Instead, they are bewildered at the popularity of the strikes, with that of the nurses being the most popular of all, since in Britain we love whatever nurses do because we love nurses so much, such that the NHS Carry On films remain a cultural point of reference, Casualty is still on, Holby City may yet be brought back, there is no reason why Call the Midwife need ever end, and the nurses' strike enjoys so much public support that it carries over into the other disputes.

Instead, they give us the payment of Boris Johnson's legal fees out of the public purse, which also picks up the tab for ferrying around that backbench MP, the Prime Minister before last, as the international statesman of his own imagination. And instead, they give us our blank cheque to Johnson's vanity project of Ukraine, which was found this week to be by far the most corrupt country to have its mainland entirely in Europe, being beaten only by Russia among those countries which were partially so located.

It beggars more than belief that a country with Ukraine's natural advantages should be Europe's poorest, and that the Presidency of Europe's poorest country should have taken a man, in less than three years, from being a stand-up comedian to being a dollar billionaire. Ukraine's dazzling corruption is becoming official news again, like its rampant Nazism, and like the role of NATO and EU expansion, contrary to express assurances at the end of the Cold War, in provoking the conflict that has been raging there at least since 2014. Until this time last year, those were commonplaces. Johnson used to articulate them in his column in the Daily Telegraph.

Lieutenant Colonel Tobias Ellwood MP of the 77th Brigade can howl at the Moon all he likes, but his lot crossed the line when it came out that they had been targeting the Fleet Street Right as if it were the rest of us. Considering where public opinion will be by December 2024, then Nigel Farage or Peter Hitchens should contest Ellwood's seat, with the other taking on Tom Tugendhat.

Meanwhile, I look forward to spotting Ellwood's mob in Durham on Monday evening, and I regret that I shall not have the chance to fight them hand-to-hand on Tuesday in Sunderland, at the pub that they had threatened to bomb. How hard can they be, since the United States still recognises China, Russia and France as top-level military powers, but no longer takes that view of Britain?

Yes, France. The twentieth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq will no doubt revive the cheap jokes about "surrender monkeys", but if any Western power really is directly at war with the Wagner Group, then it is the French in Africa, where the battle is over who should lead the fightback against al-Qaeda and IS. Remember them?

Likewise, however futilely, it was France that held out against Chinese economic expansion in Africa. Such expansion is fundamental to the lifting, initially in Sichuan but soon enough nationwide, of even the three-child policy. In the spirit of Captain Darling in Blackadder Goes Fourth, we could send in the Women's Auxiliary Balloon Corps. Or we could get into the BRICS+ Dialogue, and we could get onto the Belt and Road. If you are not at the table, then you are on the menu. If you are not on the bus, then you are under it. Mariupol and Avozstal are looking forward to a glittering future as a major entrepôt to the vast world of emerging Eurasia, and to the world of alliances beyond that.

China, India and Russia are now trading with each other in currencies that are not the dollar. Saudi Arabia is accepting yuan for oil. Even Israel has added yuan to its reserves. China has signed a security pact with the Solomon Islands, of which the late Queen was Head of State and thus technically a signatory to that pact. Russian Embassies in Africa are having to thank local men for their goodwill but ask them not to travel to Russia to join up in such numbers. Vietnam, and now even also the mighty South Africa, are holding new joint military exercises with Russia, let the American sanctions regime be damned. And so on.

If anyone is telling Rishi Sunak any of this, then it is the National Security Adviser, Sir Tim Barrow, who was Britain's last Permanent Representative and first Ambassador to the European Union. Before that, he had at one time been Ambassador to Ukraine. The power of such a figure goes some way to explaining the persistent polling of EU membership or of some sort of "closer relationship", and the headline reporting of the answers to those questions.

There has always been an axiom in politics, which partially entered wider consciousness when Michael Dobbs put it in the mouth of Francis Urquhart, that the purpose of an opinion poll was not to measure public opinion, but to influence it. Like a catechism, an opinion poll provides the questions as well as the answers. Not only is that central to understanding the strange and ongoing career of Zahawi, but it is also crucial here.

Once Russia or the Wagner Group had taken permanent control of the areas that the Soviet Union had put in the Ukrainian SSR in order to make its independence impossible, once Poland had reunified Galicia, and once Hungary had regained Carpathian Ruthenia, then the rump NATO protectorate around Kiev would be expected to consider itself lucky to be allowed the vassalage of "regulatory alignment" with the EU. The same is the plan for the other heavily occupied and massively corrupt failed state, at the EU's other extremity. Subject to American suzerainty, we may even have the pleasure of EU viceroys, always a Polish nationalist in Ukraine and always a Sinn Féiner in Ukay. Consent for all of this is merrily being manufactured.

But what else is there? The Conservatives are already deploying the perfectly accurate attack line that Labour were the last people who still believed in Trussonomics. A windfall tax is a device of Margaret Thatcher and Geoffrey Howe, designed to give the illusion that something was being done. 26 years later, what difference has been made by Tony Blair's and Gordon Brown's windfall tax on the utilities? Is Johnson's and Sunak's windfall tax on the energy companies doing any good? No one is in any position to decry Johnson's legal bills who will not also denounce Keir Starmer's waste of millions of pounds on vexatious litigation. From Short Money and other sources, the Labour Party is very largely publicly funded.

The Conservatives are probably going to double down on the culture war, but they are in no position to fight it. If Sunak believes that a woman is an adult human female, then let us see a Bill to that effect, with a three-line whip. Watching this week's Question Time, I agreed with India Willoughby about everything else, I was glad that someone provided the social democratic voice that Ian Murray did not, and I was delighted to see an edition from Scotland with no question about independence, for all Jenny Gilruth's efforts to shoehorn it in. But Willoughby's claim to have been born a woman despite having since fathered at least one child of his own was simply laughable. Yes, "his". The masculine pronouns are the only conceivable ones for a biological father. Such as Sunak, over to whom.

Nicola Sturgeon proclaims her magic power to sniff out fake transwomen, but the top and bottom is that the prospect of rapists in women's prisons has brought almost everyone round to the factual realisation from which some of us had never wavered. We were right not to compromise. We shall be proved right on Brexit, and on Ukraine, and on economics, including the strikes. One who has always held all four of those positions is my near neighbour, Daniel Kebede, who is currently a candidate for General Secretary of the National Education Union. He should be elected.

Thereafter, 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.