The Road To Serfdom

What is the weather usually like in the first quarter? The lack of economic growth is being blamed on the mere existence of the winter.

Pat Cullen is quite right to demand full pay restoration. No trade union worthy of the name would recommend a real terms pay cut, and no trade unionist worthy of the name would vote to accept one.

That the restoration of pay to its real value would require a double digit increase is an indictment of both parties that had been in government while that value had been lost, and of an Official Opposition that promised only more of the same, yet somehow better run.

Still, the staff and users of the NHS may have seen nothing until it had passed into the clutches of Wes Streeting. Keir Starmer may be lining up Streeting as his successor. Or Streeting, a much younger man but a much more experienced politician, may be planning a putsch. Or both.

But Streeting went to Westminster City School, not to Westminster. For that, you need Hamish Falconer, parachuted in as the Labour candidate for Lincoln, where the Conservative majority is only 3,514.

Falconer's father is said to have refused to move his children to state schools, thereby preventing his selection as a Labour candidate, and thus compelling his old flatmate, Tony Blair, to raise him to the peerage in order to make him first Solicitor General and then Lord Chancellor.

Believe that if you like, although such arrangements have not precluded other people's advancement in the Labour Party, but the point is that it is now stated entirely matter-of-factly that the younger Falconer, who has a thoroughly spooky CV, would be a Labour Defence Secretary within two years of election, and a Labour Foreign Secretary within two years of that, precisely because he had gone to a major public school.

Glamis, Cawdor, and King hereafter? Did they teach Streeting nothing at Cambridge? Then again, what if they did? What matters is where he went before. That has nothing to do with what, if any, other provision might exist. Westminster City School got Streeting in Cambridge, into Parliament, and into the Shadow Cabinet. But there are limits.

Beyond what may be called the greater public sector, Britain now has barely anything between the restored barons and the restored serfs, the core of each being the descendants of the old ones. There is a Wikipedia entry on at least one of Falconer's seventh generation ancestors. His great-grandfather was Lord Provost of Edinburgh for the Scottish anti-Labour alliance that was the Progressive Party.

The barons now include the sort of people who were once their imperial clients: African chiefs, Arab princes, Brahmins such as the Prime Minister, Mandarin-speaking mandarins, and so on. And the serfs are also now a multicoloured lot. But the barons are still basically the descendants of the British chieftains whose sons the Romans killed and whose daughters the Romans married, of the Romano-British chieftains whose sons the Saxons killed and whose daughters the Saxons married, and of the Anglo-Saxon chieftains whose sons the Normans killed and whose daughters the Normans married. 

Likewise, the serfs are still basically the descendants of the people whom those marriages were intended to placate. If they could not be placated, then they were subdued. There again, it is as if none of the intervening history ever happened. The only bulwark against this regression is what remains of employment and housing by the State, to which all political parties are therefore opposed as far as practicable.

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.

In the longer term, I have known far too many politicians to want one as Head of State, but I shall probably be in my sixties when the King died, and if he really were to be Charles the Last, then I would be available. The Queen is the most successful British politician in living memory, but she is slightly older than the King, so her transition to President Shand would be unlikely even by her remarkable standards. If he was at secondary school when candidates were being selected for the General Election of 1997, then Falconer must be about my age. Would you rather have him instead?