Indictment

Three Bulgarians in a bed and breakfast in Great Yarmouth. Try and contain your terror. But Norfolk and Suffolk are the scene of the latest data breach. What are the odds?

Hysterically, in both senses of the word, the top three items on Radio Four's brief news bulletin at noon were three Russian spies beside the seaside, increased interest rates in Russia, and the revelation that somewhere had been bombed in a war. Yet the word from NATO today is that Ukraine may be considered for membership if it ceded territory to Russia, so perhaps the BBC is behind the curve.

Interest rates in Britain seem rather more to the point, but that was the fourth item, and presented, as all coverage of this has been all day, as higher pay fuelling the inflation that necessitated higher rates. The reality is of course the opposite. Pay claims are a response to rising prices. The driver is corporate greed, a very important part of which is the refusal of the banks to pass on increased interest rates to savers.

Interest rates have already been increased 14 times. Has that been deflationary? Food inflation for the four weeks to 6th August was 12.7 per cent, while the Retail Price Index has inflation at 10.7 per cent. Yet pay has gone up by only 7.8 per cent in the private sector and 6.2 per cent in the public sector. Take out around 45 per cent in income tax, National Insurance, VAT, Council Tax, and so on, and real incomes are still falling. The cause of inflation is elsewhere.

But all parties are awash with that cash, and one of the many consequences of that sorry fact is that they all support the war that we are explicitly fighting for the Ukrainian regime that is a significant contributor to the wealth of Joe Biden, a lifelong politician whose wives have both been schoolteachers. It pays to keep in with the fabulously rich rulers of a country that, while stunning blessed with natural resources, manages to be the poorest in Europe.

There are many despicable things about the American Democratic Party, and one of them is that all the members of the British House of Commons would be in it. All right, there are perhaps 20, but possibly not even that many, who could be either marginal Democrats or marginal Republicans. But such Labour Left as there is, would be Bernie Sanders and AOC Democrats, complete with being as pro-war as Sanders has always been except once, on Iraq, 20 years ago. The same goes for Plaid Cymru and the Greens.

The DUP are the kind of socially ultraconservative very big spenders whose home areas would elect them to local or state office under either label, although they would never be elected at federal level just as the DUP would lose their deposits anywhere else. Such good ol' boys remain fairly likely to be Democrats, even if they availed themselves of the loose party discipline in their country by voting and campaigning for Republican candidates other than their own or each others' direct opponents, because they were in politics to get big money spent on their socially ultraconservative base, and they do. As socially a milder version of that, Alba would be even less likely to be in the GOP.

And all other MPs are the sort of people who have voted for the Democratic Party's eventual Presidential nominee on every occasion apart from 2008, when they supported Hillary Clinton, before voting for that nominee at every Presidential election of their adult lives. They rejoice at the persecution of Donald Trump, although if he found a way of getting even his Georgia state conviction to the Supreme Court, then he would still win. How likely would any court be to incarcerate a nonviolent offender in his late seventies? How likely would any court be to incarcerate the President of the United States? Yet our entire political class is wetting itself with glee at that prospect.

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.