Maxed Out?

The two policies that the people who now control the Labour Party howled from the rooftops as proof of Ed Miliband's unfitness were the energy price cap, and the abolition on non-domiciled tax status. The Conservatives have now adopted versions of both of those. Inadequate versions, but they have conceded both principles.

This evening on LBC, which being dependent on big corporate advertising is a mouthpiece of the Labour Right for which such nominally British Wall Street Democrats will pay, Keir Starmer was endorsed by Steve Bannon, who had clearly heard Starmer's speech on the Budget. In banging on about "maxing out the credit card" and all that, the man who would be First Lord of the Treasury is either economically illiterate or a complete fraud.

In a similar spirit, Rachel Reeves has been repeating the credit card line on the airwaves, along with Theresa May's "There's not a Magic Money Tree", as is her plagiaristic wont. Reeves has been claiming that she was taught to balance the books at the kitchen table by her mother. Well, Mrs Reeves, you did not make much of a job of it, since in January, your daughter remarked that she struggled to subsist on her declared income last year of £353,100, confiding that, "What makes me wince is when I look at my bank statement, and I find that the money coming in is increasingly short of the money going out."

The bank took away my overdraft facility because I was not using it. I now cannot go into the red. I am not complaining, I just think that that makes me better qualified than Reeves to be Chancellor of the Exchequer. When Reeves was Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary, then she had her parliamentary credit card taken away because she owed £4,033.63. She has learned nothing in nine years.

Alongside Reeves is Liz Kendall, recycling Reeves's and Yvette Cooper's vicious old lines about the sick and the disabled. They know that nothing that they proposed would find anyone a job. It is not intended to. It is intended to kill people on an industrial scale, as it did when Cooper was last in office, including as Secretary of State for Work and Pensions. Thankfully, Reeves is expected to contest the new seat of Leeds West and Pudsey, which has a projected Labour majority of only 5,222, while Cooper's projected majority at Pontefract, Castleford and Knottingley is a mere 758. We have already shown that we can do this.

At the first Prime Minister's Questions after the Bradford West byelection, not only was George Galloway not called to speak, as is the custom in relation to the most recently elected MP, but the Speaker did not rebuke David Cameron for referring to George by name instead of as an Honourable Member. The former was repeated today, by a Speaker who is under the thumb of Starmer's unelected Chief of Staff. As, of course, is Starmer.

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.