Heating Up

Many thanks to everyone who has been in touch to make sure that I was all right, because this site had been so quiet. The magazine and the thinktank are shaping up at a frightening rate. I am beginning to realise what I might be taking on. So yes, I am very well indeed, thank you.

It was always wrong to make the £28 billion about the Green stuff. They should have said that this was an industrial strategy, much of which happened to be Green. "Without an industrial strategy, then why have a Labour Government?" Why, indeed? £28 billion for investment? This Government has borrowed £1.7 trillion for nothing. £28 billion could easily be raised by taxing dividends and capital gains at the same rate as wages, as was the case under Margaret Thatcher. Since it no longer is, then Rishi Sunak could pay only 23 per cent tax on his income of £2.2 million last year. Of course, he makes the rules. And of course, Keir Starmer has no proposal to change them.

Labour outriders started the week saying that the Green New Deal, or whatever it was called, was why you should vote Labour. They have ended the week saying that the U-turn, which their own outlets had trailed for months, was, you've guessed it, why you should vote Labour. Don't knock it, it's a living. As part of that media operation, you can be raised to the peerage for being a comedian.

Starmer is openly planning to create 100 Peers to staff his Government. That is what he thinks of the existing Labour Peers, of the existing Labour MPs, and of the candidates whom he is imposing on Constituency Labour Parties the length and breadth of the land. He must have the list of 100 names, so would he care to publish it, so that people could know what they were voting for? And remember that if anyone other than Starmer had been made Leader, then the Parliamentary Labour Party had been all set to secede, and to litigate for ownership of the assets of what was then the financially healthy Labour Party, although it is on the brink of bankruptcy now. Ha, Ha. Ha, Ha, Ha. Ha, Ha, Ha, Ha. Ha, Ha, Ha, Ha, Ha.

Will some people now vote Green instead of Labour? In 2019, more people in North West Durham voted Green than Richard Holden's margin of victory. Bristol is full of Greens, so Thursday's Kingswood by-election, technically in Gloucestershire but really in the Bristol suburbs, will be a bit of a test. But at last year's local elections, the Green Party made big gains from the Conservatives. It won its first ever overall majority, and that was on Mid Suffolk District Council. It is the party for which the King would vote. Environmentalism is thoroughly reactionary, favouring zero economic growth, and rejoicing in the defeat of the miners in 1985. Since Eddie Milne at Blyth in February 1974, the only parliamentary candidate to the left of Labour to have been returned for an English seat has been George Galloway, and he has done it twice. Let's make it a hat-trick at Rochdale, from which the local Labour operation, such as it is, has told Starmer to stay away.

Beyond that, 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.