Standing and Falling

The standing charges on gas and electricity are 50 times the cost of maintaining the networks, and although they are supposed to protect the suppliers from going bankrupt, not only have they repeatedly failed to do so, but they have never come down when those suppliers have been eye-wateringly profitable.

The whole thing is a racket to rank with HS2, PPE, the money already paid to Rwanda to take absolutely nobody (having always said that it would take only 100 people per year), and the top secret £1,593,535,200 to rent the Bibby Stockholm for two years.

Someone is getting paid, and it is not us. Instead, we are offered a cut in inheritance tax, which is levied on only four per cent of estates, and which will be levied on only seven per cent even in 10 years' time. Truly, the boundary changes have shifted the focus back to those who veer between David Cameron and his former Coalition partners.

Meanwhile, Labour has promised to honour whatever tax and spending plans happened to be in place on the day before the next General Election. At most, it is talking about VAT on private school fees, which could not be both a body blow to those institutions and a permanent source of revenue, and which would raise all of £1.7 billion. We are to have a General Election about £1.7 billion, not quite two per cent of the education budget.

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 Rishi 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.