The Horse's Mouth

What horses is Rachel Reeves trying not to frighten? A wealth tax holds no terrors for the people and places that voted for Jeremy Corbyn in such numbers as to have delivered a hung Parliament in 2017, and would have done so again in 2022 if Corbyn's culpable capitulation to Keir Starmer over Brexit had not caused the 2019 General Election. Reeves was not addressing the Red Wall when she spoke to the Sunday Telegraph. She was not addressing anyone whom she expected to vote Labour even after she had addressed them.

Late of the Bank of England, and of the British Embassy in Washington, at neither of which will she have spoken as she now contrives to do, Reeves personifies the Deep State that, in the form of the Boundary Commission, has sought to demolish the Red Wall without a vote's having been cast. This totemic seat of North West Durham is abolished altogether, while the main event is to be the battle between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats, parties that until as recently as 2015 comprised by far the most stable and, in its own terms, successful Government since 2010, for the votes of socially ultraliberal hyper-capitalists in the Remainer heartlands, mostly in the South. Starmer's New New Labour is then supposed to come through the middle, having taken back the 2019 losses as a matter of course.

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.