Domiciles of the Mind

The Labour Party has ruled out taxing rich individuals and big corporations, so its fox has been shot by the abolition of non-dom status, which it has taken to pretending had become its policy only under Keir Starmer rather than, as in fact, all the way back under Ed Miliband and to Blairite derision at the time. For the measures that Labour claimed to want to fund out of that abolition, it can think of no other way of paying apart from more austerity elsewhere, although obviously not in the waging of wars. Killing off the expensively sick and disabled is high on the list of priorities.

Except, of course, that Liz Kendall had already announced that genocide before Jeremy Hunt ever stood up to deliver his Budget. Labour was always going to do this, as it did last time. It has never had any intention of doing the things that the non-dom policy was supposed to have made possible, because once in office, it was always going to come up with some excuse not to follow through on that one. See also the imposition of VAT on private school fees. There has never been the slightest suggestion that that was really going to happen. Nor is it a particularly good idea, although that is not the present point.

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 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. We have made a start.