Restricted Credit

Jeremy Hunt is right about debanking. The Financial Conduct Authority asked the banks whether they were doing it, they said no, and we were expected to take that as definitive. But Coutts did not compensate Nigel Farage to the tune of £750,000 for nothing, and the Left has always known how hard it was to secure a bank account in the first place for the propagation of unapproved political opinions.

Still, we have a Chancellor of the Exchequer who appears or affects not to know the conditions attached to claims for Universal Credit, or that benefit fraud per year is at most 438 times less than the money lost to PPE fraud and probably a very great deal less than that, or that raising the National Living Wage by less than inflation (5.5 per cent against 6.8 per cent) is in fact cutting it, or that it is impossible for the currency-issuing State to "run out of money".

Yet what are we offered instead?  Labour purports to ridicule those who turned up to cheer Liz Truss, but it opposed only one of the mini-Budget measures, the only one that had not been in Truss's prospectus to Conservative Party members. Had Kwasi Kwarteng's loony list ever been put to a Commons vote, then the Labour whip would have been to abstain. Having committed itself to whatever tax and spending it happened to inherit next year, Labour is desperate for Rishi Sunak to announce the abolition of inheritance tax.

Thankfully, though, 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 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.