Utility

At the height of Covid-19, it was widely remarked that the kind of profiteering that was going on would have been illegal during a war. We are daily made more aware that we knew only a tiny percentage of that, but we are also now feeling the effects of a war. And hot on the heels of Shell and BP, Centrica has recorded a profit of £3.3 billion.

As British Gas, Centrica had until very recently been able to secure the compulsory granting of warrants to enter people's homes and install prepayment meters, a service for which it had paid what had euphemistically been described as a fee on each of the hundreds or thousands of occasions at a time that it had applied online, with the warrants themselves issued over the telephone. There is a word for the merger of state and corporate power to the point of physical violence.

The solution is obvious, it would be massively popular, and there would be nothing to stop it now that we were outside the European Single Market and the Customs Union. You know that Jeremy Corbyn voted Leave. Had he stuck to his Bennite guns against Keir Starmer, then there would have been no General Election until the spring of 2022, when there would have been either a small Labour majority, or Labour as the largest party in a hung Parliament. Heaven knows what would have happened then, but that would have been the result.

The renationalisation of the utilities would be inexpensive compared to what we were already well into spending on prolonging the war in Ukraine, and it would cost hardly a penny compared to what we had already spent on the waste and corruption of track and trace, of PPE fraud, and so on. Yet while he prances like Alan Partridge around a Ukraine that has never heard of him, Starmer's Labour refuses to consider public ownership, and will soon be expelling anyone who did.

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 Rishi 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.