A General Election About What?

Having been guaranteed victory since 16th September 1992, when hardly anyone had ever heard of Tony Blair, Labour went into the 1997 Election promising to stick to the Conservatives' tax rates and departmental spending limits. That was not an electoral necessity. It was what Blair and his court, who could have done anything they pleased, actively wanted to do.

Today, Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves have promised the same thing. Again, not because they have to, but because they want to. Will this include the cost of painting walls that had already been painted, at the insistence of Robert Jenrick, who was so bent that even Boris Johnson had to sack him? And what will be the point of a General Election at which both main parties had the same plans for tax and spending?

No Opposition really goes into an Election intending to do nothing. Once elected, Blair and Gordon Brown surrendered democratic political control of monetary policy with no electoral mandate to do so, and Blair, Alan Milburn and Paul Corrigan brought the privatisation of England's National Health Service from the outer fringes of the thinktank circuit to the heart of government.

Today's interest rates, not even passed on to savers, are the result of the first measure. Meanwhile, Labour's pledge card had promised to abolish the NHS internal market, and the final week of its campaign had been a countdown of days to save the NHS. Those were barefaced lies, and the opposite of the truth. Here we are again, except that Wes Streeting is perfectly open about his bought and paid for intentions.

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.