Mrs Balls Is Talking Balls

Yvette Cooper's only objection to anything from Suella Braverman has always been that it was not going far enough, with Stephen Kinnock touring the studios to reiterate that point. And if attack ads covering Cooper's portfolio really had been put out without her knowledge and consent, then she would have resigned.

Cooper is obviously lying, but she is on manoeuvres with a view to replacing Keir Starmer as Leader of the Labour Party in this Parliament. Thankfully, she was first elected in 1997 with a majority of 15,246, and it was 14,499 as recently as 2017, but last time it fell from that to 1,276. In 2024, it will be high time to say goodbye and good riddance to the Wicked Witch of the Work Capability Assessment.

Enough of the feigned surprise that a party led by anyone who had ever so much as applied for the position of Director of Public Prosecutions was racist to the core. It hates the working class, too. As if you did not know. The presence of the likes of Cooper, a Cabinet Minister long before Starmer was a party member, indicates that there is nothing new about this, or about the genocidal attitude towards the disabled.

Labour is backpedalling on what was not even a particularly good policy of putting VAT on private school fees, with a windfall tax on oil and gas one of the two measures that were supposed to pay for whatever came into the head of the frontbencher who was being interviewed. Anyone could see that that meant that neither of those measures, nor anything that they were supposed to fund, was ever going to be attempted. Smug, arrogant and entitled, Labour thought that it just had to sit around and wait for the Ministerial cars to pull up.

The General Election will not be happening tomorrow. It will be happening late next year. On present trends of remorseless decline since the overthrow of Liz Truss, the Labour lead will have shrunk to hung Parliament territory by then. Actual votes for Labour have collapsed under Starmer, and his personal rating is relentlessly negative. Shrieking about "The Tories! The Tories! The Tories!" would work only if Labour were any better. But Starmer is even worse than "the Tories", and that is quite a feat. Both on economic policy and on foreign policy, most Labour MPs and all Labour Party staff have been well to the right of "the Tories" for many, many years.

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.