Money To Burn

Today, wholesale gas is cheaper than it has been in 756 days. Yet our energy bills are to be 80 per cent higher than they were 756 days ago, in April 2021. Gas is 12 and a half times cheaper today than it was last August. Yet your bill is not 12 and a half times lower today than it was last August. It went up by £1,300. £500 back is still the theft of £800.

The ridiculous Labour Party had wanted to freeze energy bills at double their level a year after it made that proposal. No doubt it now wants to put them back up to that. Private companies do not make political donations. They make investments, and they expect a return, whether on eight grand to send Rachel Reeves on her holidays, or on anything else. Keir Starmer inherited a huge, and healthily solvent, Labour Party, which he has turned into a shrunken rump on the brink of bankruptcy. Things are being kept ticking over by corporate donations to individual frontbenchers.

That is why Reeves is Shadow Chancellor at all. That is why Labour is to the right of 65 to 70 per cent of Conservative voters in its opposition to the renationalisation of the utilities and of the railways. That is why it supports the freeports against which even Michael Gove may now be acting, since their only point or purpose is openly and publicly stated corruption. That is why Wes Streeting is Shadow Health Secretary. And that is why he is faithful to the spirit of Tony Blair, of Alan Milburn and of Paul Corrigan, in calling for the privatisation of the National Health Service while insulting its staff and while attacking its very principle.

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 I say again that 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.