Wealth Order

Since when was one day off school an educational disaster? If rail operators whose entire business model was collecting whatever public subsidies that they happened to demand can still declare profits and pay dividends, almost always abroad and often to foreign states, then why can they not pay their staff in line with the cost of living? Between Boris Johnson's (and Rishi Sunak's) wasteful spending and dubious allocation, and Liz Truss's mini-Budget, then we are already looking at a bill that would very conservatively be estimated at £138 billion, £64 billion for him and £74 billion for her. Within Johnson's total, Sunak simply wrote off at least £4.3 billion to fraud arising out of Covid-19. Explain to me how anything would be unaffordable.

Johnson and Truss both remain in receipt of Conservative whip, which gives some context to its continued extension to Nadhim Zahawi, who merely stole £3.7 million from the public purse. A penalty cannot mean anything else; in this context, "carelessness" does not mean "an honest mistake", but "negligence", which can be criminal, and Zahawi was found out by the International Corruption Unit of the National Crime Agency. HMRC need only press what it had already proved, and Zahawi would be looking at seven years. As Andrew Gwynne confirmed at Prime Minister's Questions, although you read it here first, everyone in Parliament always knew this. Except, apparently, the Prime Minister.

Still, Zahawi is a very petty thief compared to the beneficiaries of the PPE racket, which, please note, is the basis of the claim to have increased investment in the NHS. That claim works only by counting all the money to Michelle Mone and the rest of those crooks. The Police gave Mone a week's notice to clear out of Britain before they acted against her. Give that a moment to sink in. Unsurprisingly, then, there has no more been an application to extradite her than there has been an application for an Unexplained Wealth Order against her. I do not agree with UWOs without a conviction, but they are law.

And even all of that is considerably smaller fry than the mini-Budget, which never even became law, but the mere suggestion of which caused a contraction in the economy such as no one now alive, including a baby born today and who might live to be 100, will ever see fully corrected. That is the background to the claim that settling the strikes somehow could not be afforded. In reality, such settlements would inject spending power into Britain's highly consumer-based economy, in which nearly half of workers earned less than £20,000 and therefore spent most or all of what they did earn. If that would be inflationary, then what is causing inflation now? It is certainly not high wages.

Likewise, the United States, China, Canada, Japan and Russia have never been in the EU to leave it, while they, France, Germany and Italy are all in the world of Covid-19 and of the war in Ukraine, yet the United Kingdom's is the only economy that is predicted to shrink in 2023. Sanctioned Russia is doing better than Britain, because of course it is. Sanctions stimulated all manner of domestic production and consumption in the Soviet Union, and the people running Russia still know how to make that happen. We are sanctioning only ourselves.

Meanwhile, we have written a blank cheque to a Ukrainian regime that is collapsing in its own corruption, a corruption that is now being mentioned in the official media in the way that Ukrainian Nazism is again, just as it was routinely until this time last year. A week ago, we offered tanks, even though we did not have them to spare. Today, Ukraine demands nuclear weapons. Mission creep in the social media age. Again I ask how settling the strikes would be unaffordable.

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. Those means therefore require to be under democratic political control. Yet do not expect to hear any of this from the Labour Party, which opposes the strikes, which said little about the Covid-19 fiddles at the time, which supported and supports all but one measure in the mini-Budget, which said nothing about Zahawi despite having known all along, and which is pro-sanctions and pro-war with the fanaticism that only the liberal bourgeoisie, which does not fight wars, can ever muster.

Labour has even adopted the Government's tactic of calling minimum service levels "minimum safety levels", although the Trade Union Bill does not mention safety. Far from repealing that legislation, Labour would be vastly more likely than the Conservatives to use those powers. But 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.