Growing Pains

Zero economic growth is bad, and it is a failure in the Government's own terms, but economic growth without redistribution would in any case be nothing more than increased inequality. Only at the very top would anyone be any better off. Likewise, a drop in inflation from 10 per cent last year to 2.9 per cent this year means only that your standard of living will be, and is, going down by 2.9 per cent rather than by 10 per cent. It is still going down.

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. But none of this is of the slightest interest, so to speak, to Keir Starmer, whose expenses as Director of Public Prosecutions were three times those of his successor over the same length of time, including more than £160,000 for a chauffeur-driven car between his home and his office, a distance of four miles. He also took first or business class flights to four continents, and charged £1,489 for food on a single day.

But in October, Labour's poll lead was 37 per cent. It now hovers between 11 and 15. When I tell you 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.

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.