Wigs and Caps

To their Thatcher, Trump, Wilders and Milei toupées, those who besport themselves in such headwear now need to add the Reeves. Labour is going into the General Election to the right of the IMF, and specifically committed to a cap on benefits for third and subsequent children, but to no cap on bankers' bonuses.

Tax cuts for whom? 42 per cent of adults do not have the gross monthly incomes from all sources of just over a thousand pounds to pay income tax, and most of the rest might get a tax cut of, what, fifty quid a month? If that. In any case, the IMF, speaking for all the rest of that lot, has specifically said no in advance. This could turn nasty.

Already, it is all kicking off in Argentina. That, in turn, means that Javier Milei could reach for an invasion of the Falkland Islands. He is mad enough, the claim is of course fundamental to the Argentine Right, and then what would his fanboys say, in between taking receipt of their redundancy notices from the Telegraph Group and moving onto their new desks at Rachel Reeves's Labour Party?

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.