Of Interest

Of course the austerity programme left Britain weakened in the face of Covid-19. If it had not been that pandemic, then it would have been something else. Yet we are expected to accept that that could not have been the case, because David Cameron and George Osborne have said so. It is inescapably the case that the Liberal Democrats actively implemented austerity in government, that it eased very slightly when they left office, and that the Labour Party supported it so ferociously that it chose to lose a General Election rather than take a stand against it. The people who ran Labour then are back running it now.

There have been strikes for over a year because work no longer pays, yet the line from all parties is that wages are causing inflation. Read that again in case you had understandably thought that I had mistyped it. I had not. We savers are seeing no benefit from these increases in interest rates. Guess which thieves are once again back funding all political parties. But while I never thought that I would thank Norman Lamont for anything, it turns out that recessions are a matter of choice by the State after all. Meanwhile, giving up democratic political control of monetary policy has therefore proved to have been a disaster.

Without a manifesto commitment, Labour farmed out monetary policy. The Lib Dems forced the creation of the Office for Budget Responsibility. On their own initiative, the Conservatives last year created the Economic Advisory Council out of thin air. Yet on none of those occasions have the salaries of the First Lord of the Treasury, of all other Treasury Ministers, and of all senior Treasury civil servants been halved, as in each of those cases they should have been.

If there is an Economic Advisory Council, then what is the Treasury for? And look who is on it. Imperial protectorates and Indian princely states had British advisers whose advice had to be taken, and our nominally sovereign little colony of BlackRock and JP Morgan is in much the same position. 

Rupert Harrison was Osborne's long-time Chief of Staff and then Evening Standard employee, while Osborne, Philip Hammond and Sajid Javid are also all advising Jeremy Hunt. They all know perfectly well that a sovereign state with its own free floating, fiat currency has as much of that currency as it chooses to issue to itself, with readily available fiscal and monetary means of controlling any inflationary effect, means that therefore require to be under democratic political control. They just refuse to do it. 

It follows that, at 100 per cent of GDP or otherwise, there is no debt. It is an accounting trick. The Treasury, which is the State, has issued bonds to the Bank of England, which is the State. Even if those bonds were held by anyone else, then the State could simply issue itself with enough of its own free floating, fiat currency to redeem them. There is no debt. There is no debt. There is no debt.

This evening, Harrison was selected as the Conservative candidate for Bicester and Woodstock. Yet who would you have instead? Rachel Reeves? 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 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.