Casting The Net Wide

They are seriously considering the possibility that they may have found aliens long after they have stopped looking for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. But if Tony Blair has doubts about Net Zero, which is non-coincidentally Keir Starmer's approval rating here in the Red Wall constituencies, then he is presumably planning to apply for membership of George Galloway's Workers Party of Britain. Many members of Arthur Scargill's Socialist Labour Party have recently joined the fiercely pro-industrial WPB, which is now campaigning for a referendum on Net Zero. While I have my doubts about that, it does give Blair somewhere to go. He has nowhere else.

My favourite question of Greens is, "Do you regret the defeat of the miners in 1985?" It always stops them in their tracks. And I have the same question for post-Thatcherite culture warriors and opponents of Net Zero, "Do you regret the defeat of the miners in 1985?" If not, then I can give you chapter and verse as to why you did not really regret the loss of any of things that you claim to, although you might sincerely believe that you did. At the recent local elections, the considerable Green gains were mostly from the Conservatives.

Although she began to blather on about environmentalism as a means of Socialist control once she had the dementia that also turned her into a born again Eurosceptic, Margaret Thatcher was very Green indeed as Prime Minister, shocking first the Royal Society, and then the United Nations General Assembly, with her passion on the subject. Theresa May gave the nation the Climate Change Act, and her erstwhile Chief of Staff has in the last few hours been selected for Matt Hancock's seat. Boris Johnson described Thatcher's destruction of the British coal industry as "a big early start" towards Net Zero. Her milk-snatching is now held up as a pioneering strike against the wicked dairy industry, as I had been predicting for donkey's years.

Leo Abse had the measure of the milk-snatcher, as he had of Blair's androgyny. With its concept of the self-made man or the self-made woman, gender self-identification is where Thatcherism has inevitably ended up. It was an unknown concept in 2010, and has arisen entirely under a Conservative Government. Thatcher was last depicted on British television, for the first time in quite a while, in December's Prince Andrew: The Musical, the title of which spoke for itself, and in which she was played by one Baga Chipz, a drag queen. Well, of course. A figure comparable to Thatcher, emerging in the Britain of the 2020s, would be assumed to be a transwoman, just as Thatcher herself emerged in the Britain of everything from Danny La Rue and Dick Emery to David Bowie and The Rocky Horror Show.

Ah, yes, the 1970s. The Mail on Sunday, so you know that the knives really are out, reports that the victims of Jimmy Savile are coming for Starmer, and not before time. Starmer was the Director of Public Prosecutions when the decision was made not to prosecute Savile. Due to Savile's fame and connections, of course it is inconceivable that that decision was made by anyone other than Starmer, just as of course he was sly enough not to have left a paper trail. Why did Starmer let Savile off? Why is Starmer so dependent on Jeffrey Epstein's closest associate in Britain, indeed one of Epstein's closest associates in the world? What sort of person therefore wants Starmer to become Prime Minister? 

Even from his cell, Epstein was still making donations to "Petie" Mandelson. Prince Andrew is an utterly unimportant person. Epstein's British connection that matters is to Mandelson, who pretty much ran the Labour Party when it was last in government, and who is back running it now, having solicited a large donation from Epstein's cell as a convicted and incarcerated paedophile.

In the meantime, Mandelson has been European Commissioner for Trade, President of the Board of Trade, Lord President of the Council, and First Secretary of State. In all but name, he was Deputy Prime Minister under Gordon Brown, and arguably under Blair as well. Prince Andrew has never even run his own bath. Mandelson, however, is now running Starmer, who is the most inexperienced politician ever to have become the Leader of the Opposition.

As a Commonwealth citizen who is not serving a term of imprisonment in the United Kingdom or in the Republic of Ireland, Julian Assange is eligible to contest a British General Election. He ought to do so for the seat of Holborn and St Pancras, which is presently occupied by Starmer. The neighbouring constituency of Islington North is certainly going to return its MP since 1983, Jeremy Corbyn. It is now quite clear that Emma Dent Coad is going to contest Kensington, which she lost by only 150 votes and where she remains a sitting councillor with a very high local profile through the campaign for justice for Grenfell Tower. Should Diane Abbott still be without the whip when the General Election were called, then Hackney North and Stoke Newington would be no contest. As it would be if she had the whip, come to that. And so on. All this, and Jamie Driscoll, too.

After all, the latest horror story is that Starmer would not abolish the bedroom tax, so what is the Labour Party for? It arose out of the determination of the economically productive classes of what was then the richest and most powerful country in the history of the world, first to explain their poverty, and then to defeat it. If there was one thing about which all Labour people really did used to agree, then it was that the State had a duty to eradicate child poverty.

Even if you took the hardline Blairite view that from the day that you embarked on adult life, you were solely responsible for what you did with your Sure Start, then you were emphatic that you were entitled to it in the first place, and in fact the last Labour Government did a great deal about child poverty, the fight against which was the driving passion of Gordon Brown's political life. What is there to Labour now? Nothing. Absolutely nothing at all.

Indeed, strongly though we may agree with Bridget Phillipson about the importance of dressing well, and while her claims of childhood deprivation are nowhere near as farfetched as Wes Streeting's, they do cry out for interrogation. For one thing, Labour came to power when she was 13. For another, working for a charity founded by her mother was Phillipson's only job until she entered Parliament at the age of 26.

Reform UK lost its deposit at two of the recent byelections, while the Reclaim Party did so at the third. There is no populist Right. There is only an unpopulist Right. 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.