Rich Pickings

No wealth tax from Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves, but an extra nine per cent for graduates who earned £25,000 per annum. I do not usually do the middle-class whinging around student finance, but this time the whiners have a point.

Since the announcement of no wealth tax, and what a thing it is to have witnessed the announcement of nothing, a number of possible forms of it have been doing the rounds. In every case, they would raise eye-popping sums of money by making a negligible difference to the lives of an infinitesimal number of people who would not get a better deal anywhere else that they might ever want to live.

Reeves would not even tax dividends, inheritance and capital gains at the same rate as earnings, which Margaret Thatcher, Geoffrey Howe and Nigel Lawson did. If Starmer and Reeves have no spending plans beyond those of the present Government, then why would they wish to be the First and Second Lords of the Treasury instead of Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt? Why do they want the jobs? What for?

Not that they would be foregoing any wars, since the money can always, always, always be found for those. Of course it can. The issuing of currency is an act of the State, which is literally the creator of all money. A sovereign state with its own free floating, fiat currency has as much of that currency as it chooses to issue to itself. All wars are fought on this understanding, but the principle applies universally.

The State also has the fiscal and monetary means to control inflation, means that therefore need to be under democratic political control in both cases. That is what both fiscal policy and monetary policy are for: to give the currency its value by controlling inflation to a politically chosen extent while encouraging certain politically chosen forms of behaviour, and while discouraging others, including the encouragement of economic equality, which is fundamental to social cohesion and thus to patriotism. Taxation is not where the State's money comes from. Nothing is "unaffordable", every recession is discretionary on the part of the Government, and there is no such thing as "taxpayers' money".

It follows that, at 100 per cent of GDP or otherwise, there is no debt. It is an accounting trick. The Treasury, which is the State, has issued bonds to the Bank of England, which is the State. Even if those bonds were held by anyone else, then the State could simply issue itself with enough of its own free floating, fiat currency to redeem them. There is no debt. There is no debt. There is no debt.

If Starmer does not know all of this, then he is unqualified to be Prime Minister. Reeves certainly does know it. She just chooses to lie about it. 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 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.