Frost In May

The National Conservatism conference is in full swing, and all the talk is of David Frost's stepping down from the House of Lords to stand against Andrew Bridgen. As if there were any need. Brigden stands no chance of reelection, anyway. Except in one case, on which see below, perhaps at no General Election has anyone ever been returned against the Conservative Party and avowedly from its right. But note well that whatever it is that Bridgen represents, then National Conservatism defines itself as the opposite.

Jacob Rees-Mogg is right about voter identification, if not in quite the way that he thinks. It did indeed lead to a bad set of local election results for the Conservatives, and that was because the poor now split evenly between Labour and the Conservatives, but the rich are now more likely, according to the local circumstances, to vote Labour, Liberal Democrat or Green than they are to vote Conservative.

The poor are more numerous than the rich, and here we are. It is no wonder that Labour is keeping quiet about this mass disenfranchisement. Never interrupt the enemy when he is making a mistake. If the argument is that photographic identification to vote already exists in Northern Ireland, then the Government is expressing an existential fear of at least half the electorate, although it is quite wrong to have such a fear. The silent Opposition has every reason.

It may be cheap to say that Suella Braverman must wish that she were Home Secretary, but it is true. The money for this event comes from a republic founded in annually celebrated treason against Britain, and which had no restriction on immigration, rather than on naturalisation, until 1875, practically a century after that foundation. Until the forthcoming latest British figures, it retains its immemorial distinction of having the highest foreign-born proportion of any population on earth. For example, throughout his education, Yoram Hazony.

The intellectual impetus for this event, you see, comes from a republic founded in daily celebrated terrorism against Britain, of exceptional viciousness and still just within living memory. That republic uses the purest form of Proportional Representation in the world, giving the lie to the suggestion that PR granted hegemony to the Left, and it aggressively encourages immigration, ostensibly of a particular type, but it is in practice prepared to be quite flexible. Fourth generation Israelis are either small children or Arabs, if not both.

But the attendees are speaking only to themselves. It is Labour and the Lib Dems who have recently made gains from the Conservatives, while left-wingers who had been expelled from the Labour Party stormed home, while the SDP doubled its municipal base, and while the Greens ended the night with far more Councillors than UKIP had ever had, largely in what had been true blue areas.

Meanwhile, no Reform candidate was elected this time, of around 400 who had been fielded, and UKIP lost its half a dozen remaining seats. All of 23 MPs who had been elected as Conservatives voted against the Windsor Framework, although even one of those had already lost the whip, he has since been kicked out of the party altogether, and he has just joined a party on the outermost fringe. The remaining 22 are the conventionally defined Right's absolute maximum, with a core that is no more than half that size, little or none of which will be permitted to contest the next General Election in the Conservative interest.

Douglas Carswell and Mark Reckless held theirs seats at by-elections, and Carswell even managed to hold on narrowly at the General Election of 2015, but no one else since the War has been elected to the House of Commons against the Conservative Party and explicitly from its right. It is possible that at a General Election, no one but Carswell ever has been. Certainly, no one will be next year. Contrast that with the racing certainty that Jeremy Corbyn is going to take the 20,000 votes necessary to be the First Past the Post at Islington North, putting him in the hung Parliament of 2024.

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 Keir 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.