Hard Choices Must Be Made

Unless you would vote for Chuck Grassley, then you have no reason to vote Labour, and every reason not to. Go through the supposed Dream Team that Keir Starmer has assembled, and tell me which of them you would employ. But even if they won, then what would they do?

In 2015, Liz Kendall stood for Leader on a programme of cutting benefits further and faster than the newly elected Conservative overall majority was going to do. Her 4.5 per cent would be low for that sort of thing in the Labour Party today, but at the time we wondered who even that many people could possibly have been. Yet, or therefore, she is now the Shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions. Minutes after her appointment, she was reassuring Jo Coburn that the sensible and responsible thing to do was literally to starve children at school.

Charging for school meals would boggle the minds and turn the stomachs of many other developed countries. As with so many things, so much for the Europeanism of those who opposed free school meals for all, and so much for the EU that never made us have them. Like free prescriptions, free eye and dental checkups, free hospital parking, and so much else besides, free school meals for all will soon be "unaffordable" in England only, and in the case of free primary school meals only outside London, with abolition in Scotland or Wales advocated no more by the Conservatives than by anyone else. Why?

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.

An Opposition that does not understand this, is unfit to become the Government. But the existing Government understands it perfectly well. There is no talk of democratic political control over monetary policy, or anything like that, but fiat currency is created all over the place for party donors and just plain chums, including Rishi Sunak's in-laws, who are neither British citizens nor resident in the United Kingdom. There are new stories every day. It has become white noise. The Government refuses to take the deflationary measures, which would hit those same people, so of course there is inflation. The Minister of Defence in Ukraine was so corrupt that he has been moved to be Ambassador to London. No doubt, he is already fitting right in.

Especially since the same people were now funding both parties, a practice that I would make illegal, Labour would change little or none of this. Yet whose vote is that supposed to attract? Nothing would be done about dry spilling, or about the fact that the Royal Mail had missed its own targets in every postcode in the country and now planned to scrap Saturday deliveries, or about the end of recruitment to railway ticket offices even before the consultation process had been written up, or about anything else at all, because the blatantly obvious, and massively popular, solution had been peremptorily ruled out.

The last Labour Government did nothing about RAAC. Notice that Bridget Phillipson is specifically refusing to spend any money on it. The Government's latest attack on the disabled is pure Yvette Cooper. The Guardian is moaning because it has got exactly what it wanted. Birmingham City Council has gone bust because it did not abide by the equal pay law. And so on, and on, and on, and on, and on.

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.