Feel No Gilt

Did even his worst enemy ever suggest that John McDonnell did not understand how the debt markets worked? Yet Rachel Reeves has today demonstrated at length that she did not. One of the most important shifts from the Old Labour Right to New Labour was the marked drop in the intellectual tone.

Or Tone, since the key event was of course Tony Blair's pushing aside of Gordon Brown in the week after John Smith's death, when the Labour poll lead was already unassailable. Even if there had still been any risk of a fifth Conservative victory, and there was not, then no one in Middle England was going to have been put off by Brown having previously intended to vote for Smith.

Still, in that week, the tradition that, for all its many faults, stretched from Brown, through Smith, to figures such as Denis Healey and beyond, was supplanted by that which began with Blair and has if anything become even less well-read in his wake.

One of the functions of the right wing of the Labour Party has always been as the Establishment's B Team, but there is no longer anything else at all to it. These are people who are startling less capable, both than the Conservatives whom they are Shadowing, and than the left-wingers whom they have replaced. That is the case even though the Government is rubbish. The Labour frontbench is even worse. Jeremy Hunt should challenge Reeves to a live, televised debate, just as Michael Rosen should challenge Rachel Riley.

Thankfully, Rishi Sunak has delivered a body blow to the Green-aligned SNP in the North East of Scotland. The Liberal Democrats are roaring back in the West County. Not even Keir Mather expects Labour to hold Selby and Ainsty. Net Zero is Keir Starmer's approval rating here on the Red Wall. ULEZ is dooming Labour in Metroland, with the suspicion of similar things poised to do it no end of damage in suburbia generally. Interest rates and inflation may be a lot lower this time next year than they were now.

By then, the few Labour MPs who had withdrawn their signatures from the Stop the War Coalition's statement on Ukraine will have been shown to have been right the first time; indeed, they already have been. Corbyn is going to hold Islington North, if he had not decided to become Mayor of London instead, or even if he had. Diane Abbott is going to hold Hackney North and Stoke Newington. Emma Dent Coad is going to win back Kensington. And so on.

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 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.