Not The Right Audience

To call Keir Starmer a Thatcherite would be an insult to Thatcherites. The Thatcher Government taxed unearned income at the same rate as earnings. Starmer refuses to consider that. He is also about to abandon John Smith's signature policy that employment rights should begin with employment and apply regardless of the number of hours worked, so he is not a figure of the traditional Labour Right, much less of the Soft Left. No Government before 2017 had a two-child benefit cap, so Starmer is worse even than Tony Blair or his Heir, David Cameron.

Yet it had already been Labour and the Liberal Democrats who had been making gains from the Conservatives, while left-wingers are storming home once they have been expelled from the Labour Party or they have resigned from it in disgust. The SDP has doubled its municipal base, and the Greens now have far more Councillors than UKIP ever had, largely in what had been true blue areas. Meanwhile, no Reform UK candidate was elected this year, of around 400 who had been fielded, and UKIP lost its half a dozen remaining seats. Reform UK averages six per cent in those wards where it can find 10 people to sign its nomination papers, it has 11 Councillors in the entire country, and no other Outer Right party has any whatever. Some populism.

All of 23 MPs who had been elected as Conservatives voted against the Windsor Framework, although even one of those had already lost the whip, he has since been kicked out of the party, and he has joined one on the outermost fringe. Another has resigned his seat. The remaining 21 are the conventionally defined Right's absolute maximum, with a core that is no more than half that size, little or none of which will contest the next General Election in the Conservative interest.

Parliamentary candidates who stand against the Conservative Party overtly from its right have a hopeless record. Douglas Carswell and Mark Reckless held theirs seats at by-elections, and Carswell even managed to hold on narrowly at the General Election of 2015, but no one else since the War has been elected to the House of Commons against the Conservative Party and explicitly from its right. It is possible that at a General Election, no one but Carswell ever has been. Certainly, no one will be next year.

Diane Abbott's majority at Hackney North and Stoke Newington is more than the total number of votes that Nigel Farage has won across the seven parliamentary elections that he has contested. By contrast, George Galloway's victory at Bradford West, publicly predicted only by me, remains the stuff of legend, and Jamie Driscoll is now the whole point of next year's North East Mayoral Election as Ken Livingstone was of that in London in 2000, while no one doubts for a second that Jeremy Corbyn would take 20,000 votes and be the First Past the Post at Islington North, putting him in the hung Parliament of 2024.

And 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.