Quite A Bit To It

Peter Thiel sees it. Britain’s unpopular “populists” promote neoliberal economic policies and neoconservative foreign policies with a fanaticism that has almost no international parallel while publicly pretending to hold conservative social views, and Britain’s eccentric “centrists” promote those policies just as fanatically while attempting no such pretence. There is no true difference between the two. Each year, you can tell which party is in favour with the deciders by which holds a Conference full of illness profiteers and arms dealers. The mark of a party hack on the up is a sudden conversion to NHS privatisation and to support for American, Israeli and, hitherto, Saudi bellicosity.

But Rishi Sunak effectively confirmed today that the next General Election would be late next year, and 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. On the day that Sunak became Prime Minister, I predicted that a General Election between him and Keir Starmer would result in a hung Parliament. And that was before Starmer had caused Labour’s Muslim vote to collapse.

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.