Free Tuition

Support for tuition fees is a Blairite shibboleth to rank only with support for First Past the Post, and even that was shared with Tony Benn, as it still is with Dennis Skinner and Jeremy Corbyn. My own view on the electoral system is the same as my view on the monarchy, that the arguments on both sides are utter rubbish, meaning that the case for change has not been made.

So no one ever did expect Keir Starmer to abolish tuition fees. He cannot even point out, although it is true, that Corbyn had wanted to do that by raising corporation tax such as the Government had in any case done, but not in order to give anyone anything nice. "Corbyn's taxes without the goodies" would be accurate, but the people running the Labour Party are hardly in a position to say it.

Nick Robinson tried to tell Rachel Reeves that plenty of people "on modest incomes" were sending their children to private schools, and she did not correct him, but in reality no one is scrimping and saving to find anything from £15,000 to £50,000 per year. Anywhere on that scale, you either have that kind of money, or you do not. Even HMRC, which is the State, admits that 50 per cent of workers in Britain have gross annual incomes of less than £20,000. Two in five adults do not reach the income tax threshold of £12,570, just over one thousand pounds per month. And yes, that does include benefits and everything else. VAT on school fees is a bad idea, but not for that reason.

We had to wait a few hours for Jo Coburn to point out to Emily Thornberry that Labour had supported almost every measure in the mini-Budget, the most misnamed phenomenon since Britain's Got Talent. The only exception was the abolition of the 45p rate of income tax, the only measure than had not been in Liz Truss's prospectus to her party's members. Had the mini-Budget ever been put to a Commons Division, then Labour's whipped abstention would have saved it. Labour is going into the next General Election as the only party that still thought that Trussonomics was broadly, and often very specifically, a good idea. And all because of Liam Byrne's pig-ignorant note about there being "no money left", which was in the same spirit as Margaret Thatcher's perfectly illiterate assertion that the State had no money of its own and therefore ran the risk of running out of it.

All parties agree with Thatcher on that, and think that it happened when Byrne was in office, so Reeves refuses to accept John McDonnell's observation that if the real value of pay were not restored then there would be no point in having a Labour Government, while another pillar of the authoritarian centrist Establishment, the SNP, floats the abolition of universal free school meals. What next? Prescription charges? Tuition fees? The SNP is already planning to pioneer conviction by a State employee sitting alone, so that its clubmates could claim that that had "worked" in Scotland and could therefore be introduced throughout the United Kingdom. Likewise, things undesirable to Blairite or to National Conservative opinion can be claimed to have "failed" in Scotland.

But 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.