Triple Word Score

210,000 people have left Unite in the last four years, and the strike fund has fallen from £35 million to £11 million, enough to last only about eight months. Sadly, it is those leaving who are likely to object to the continued funding of the anti-labour Labour Party, which does not even have the grace to pretend to be grateful, instead gushing every time it receives an anti-worker donation because anything is better than the wicked unions.

What do we, the trade unions, get out of this? For example, the Government has stolen yet another £420 million from the Mineworkers’ Pension Scheme in the last three years, part of the £4.8 billion with which it has made off in the last 30 years, 13 of them under Labour. At least the old miners have mostly not voted Conservative on the occasions when that party has won. Much as I support the WASPI women, many, perhaps even half or more, of those of them who voted in 2019 voted to rebuff Labour’s offer of full restitution.

Today’s Observer editorial bemoaning Labour’s failure to be more robust against poverty, like the articles in that vein every day in The Guardian, should be read in the context of those newspapers’ participation, both in the “Labour anti-Semitism” hoax that set the mood against an available anti-poverty Government, and in the clamour for a commitment to a second referendum on EU membership, Keir Starmer’s killer blow that caused the 2019 General Election to be called long before it was due, resulting in the predictable and predicted loss of 52 Leave seats out of the 54 that switched from Labour to Conservative. Jeremy Corbyn should have sacked him.

Still, Unite has come out in support of Jamie Driscoll, and we have denounced Starmer’s lunatic scheme to ban new oil and gas licences in the North Sea. If Unite were still affiliated to the Labour Party in 2026, and if no one with a higher profile had stepped up to the plate, then I would be a candidate for General Secretary, in support of an all-of-the-above energy policy, and to secure disaffiliation both from the Labour Party and from the ILGA. Join Unite Community here.

Trade union pay claims should now be for £100,000 per annum, since Jeremy Hunt has said that that was not a lot of money. But over to Labour and the rest of them to match his commitment to the triple lock. National Insurance is a tax that goes into the general pot out of which are paid, along with everything else, the benefits claimed now, including the pension. That has always been the case. It has never been some kind of personal pension scheme. If every comparable country manages a much higher pension at a much earlier age, then so can we. If we can afford, well, at this stage you could very easily make your own list, then we can afford the triple lock, and that on something a lot higher than we had now.

Inflation is a political choice. A sovereign state with its own free-floating, fiat currency has as much of that currency as it chooses to issue to itself, with readily available fiscal and monetary means of controlling any inflationary effect, means that therefore require to be under democratic political control. There is no debt. It is an accounting trick. The Treasury, which is the State, has issued bonds to the Bank of England, which is the State. Even if those bonds were held by anyone else, then the State could simply issue itself with enough of its own free floating, fiat currency to redeem them. There is no debt. There is no debt. There is no debt.

Giving up democratic political control of monetary policy has been a disaster. Without a manifesto commitment, Labour farmed out monetary policy. The Liberal Democrats forced the creation of the Office for Budget Responsibility. The Conservatives have created the Economic Advisory Council out of thin air. Yet on none of those occasions have the salaries of the First Lord of the Treasury, of all other Treasury Ministers, and of all senior Treasury civil servants been halved, as in each of those cases they should have been.

If there is an Economic Advisory Council, then what is the Treasury for? And look who is on it. Imperial protectorates and Indian princely states had British advisers whose advice had to be taken, and our nominally sovereign little colony of BlackRock and JP Morgan is in much the same position. Rupert Harrison was George Osborne’s long-time Chief of Staff and then Evening Standard employee, while Osborne, Philip Hammond and Sajid Javid are also all advising Hunt. Harrison has been selected as the Conservative candidate for Bicester and Woodstock. Yet whom would you have instead? Rachel Reeves? Even if Harrison were a sitting Conservative MP, then would Reeves remove him from the Economic Advisory Council? Merely to ask that question answers it.

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.

I have no plan to join the Workers Party of Britain, although nor would I expect to stand against it. If, however, it did not contest North Durham, then I would. 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.