Significantly Downgraded

The honouring of the Triple Lock is good news, and so what that it is electioneering? But only England has prescription charges, so only here will the poorest people, two out of five of them in work, have to spend 10 per cent of a week's income on a prescription. How is that supposed to find jobs for the other three in five Universal Credit claimants?

Across the United Kingdom, all previous "crackdowns" on the supposedly lead-swinging disabled have failed, but not before having killed hundreds of thousands of people. The Department for Work and Pensions already spends far more on contesting largely successful appeals than it would cost just to pay the benefits in the first place. That is about to get even worse, and at the most horrific human cost as well. How is any of this supposed to find anyone a job? Then again, in the words of Rishi Sunak, "Let people die."

Meanwhile, the increase in the minimum wage will be largely eaten up by National Insurance, even after today, and by income tax, the threshold for which remains frozen. By 2028-2029, the frozen tax thresholds will cause four million more people to pay income tax, and 400,000 more to pay the 45p rate, while VAT and corporation tax will rise from 6.4 per cent and 3.4 per cent of GDP this year, to 6.5 per cent and 3.6 per cent of GDP that year.

And for what? Real Gross Domestic Product per person will remain 0.6 per cent below its pre-pandemic peak, to which it will not return before 2025. For all the talk of giving businesses incentives to invest, why would they do so when potential consumers' real incomes were down? Where is the incentive there? Accordingly, the economy is expected to grow by only 0.6 per cent in 2023, and by only 0.7 per cent in 2024.

Yet what are we offered instead? Keir Starmer, Rachel Reeves, Wes Streeting, Liz Kendall, Darren Jones, and all the rest of those who think that none of this goes far enough. They idolise the last Labour Government, in which Yvette Cooper introduced the intentionally mass murdering Work Capability Assessment, and which effected the biggest upward redistribution of wealth in British history.

Labour is now the greater evil, worse than the Tories. The best for which we could hope from it would be that, after last week's non-revelation that Starmer's class paid its members 12 per cent more than it paid us for the same jobs, he might reduce by about one eighth the salaries of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Foreign Secretary, the Home Secretary, and so on, when he replaced Jeremy Hunt with Reeves, David Cameron with David Lammy, James Cleverly with Cooper, and so forth. Of course, once his carefully contrived 2024 intake had been there a few years, then the pay would have to go up again as he appointed the people whom he had really always wanted.

We should no more want Labour to win the next General Election than most of its MPs wanted it to win the last two, or than any of its staff wanted it to win the last four. 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.