Going Far Enough

England is the only part of the United Kingdom that has prescription charges, and the Conservatives in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland (where a few of them do exist) are no more in favour of their reintroduction than anyone else is. Similarly, England outside London will soon be the only place without universal free school meals, and the same thing will apply.

40 per cent of Universal Credit claimants are in work, a direct public subsidy to low pay, but that is, if not exactly another story, nevertheless a different chapter of this one. In any event, taking away claimants' entitlement to free prescriptions and dental treatment, while saving a negligible amount of money, is not going to find anyone a job.

David Cameron is back, all right. This sort of thing killed 330,000 people, more than 50,000 per year, the last time that he was in, although he was only carrying on where Yvette Cooper had left off. The non-Opposition cheered it on, with the position of Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer successively held by Ed Balls and Chris Leslie. Did Labour win the 2015 Election? Balls not only lost his own seat, but lost it to Andrea Jenkyns. The voters preferred that.

We cripples know what Rachel Reeves thinks of us, and Liz Kendall, who has plenty of form where this sort of thing is concerned, has today confirmed, not only that Labour would not vote against the latest proposals, but that she and it thought that they did not go far enough.

Here as on foreign policy, Labour is now objectively the greater evil, worse than the Tories. Of course we do not want the Labour Party to win the next General Election. The people who control it openly and actively wanted it to lose the last two; Conservative attack lines to the contrary would be laughable even if those advancing them had not successfully campaigned for Boris Johnson at an Election that Keir Starmer had caused to be held at all, specifically in order to lose it by a landslide. The Labour Party's entire staff has not wanted it to win a General Election since 19 years before the next one, and intentionally cost it victory in 2017.

Well, we do not want the Labour Party to win the next General Election, and we are entirely open about saying so. Sauce for the goose, and all that. 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. 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.