Drawing The Sting?

Quantitative Easing was £895 billion. See also HS2, PPE, Test and Trace, the Bibby Stockholm, the Rwanda Scheme, and so much else besides. But the two-child benefit cap is sacrosanct, the withdrawal of the Winter Fuel Payment is at best something that cannot be helped (although Rachel Reeves has been advocating it in principle for many years), the increase in employers' National Insurance contributions has to destroy charities and small businesses while making it impossible for big businesses to take on staff or to increase wages, working farmers of many decades' standing who formally inherited their parents' farms have to be forced to sell them to giant American agribusinesses, workers' bus fares have to be increased by 50 per cent, and not one penny piece is available for the WASPI women. Yet all of this is for what? Today's catastrophic inflation figures have come as no surprise, while government debt is even higher than it was under Liz Truss.

Especially with such a large cohort of freshers, many of whom were literally so in the very recent past, Labour normally has no difficulty finding backbench MPs to defend the Government. When it came to things like the two-child benefit cap, the withdrawn Winter Fuel Payment, the jobs tax, the farm tax, and the bus fares, then they were in any case enthusiastically in agreement. Labour Rightists hate buses to the point of psychosis. But beyond the payroll, the party cannot find anyone to state its case against the WASPI women, even though in many ways they are the least sympathetic of its domestic victims. Many of their supposed hard luck stories display a striking lack of self-awareness in people who were now aged between 69 and 74. Similarly, while talk of 100 rebels means 50 at most, where were they all on the previous issues? The vote looks set to be forced by the Liberal Democrats, but where were they in the key years of 2010 to 2015?

All the money in the world can apparently also be found for Ukraine, although follow that link for the prediction of today's developments in May 2022, and we have already set off down the same road in support of al-Qaeda in the parts of Syria that Israel did not yet want. Ukraine, Syria and WASPI are of a piece in that all the worst people in British politics are one side, so whatever the faults of the other, you should at least not be on theirs. That thing with CNN was so obviously fake that the only wonder is that it has taken so long for the network and its little friends to admit it, but we should only laugh so hard. With a secondary flag that bore more than a passing resemblance to that of the Taliban, the new regime in Syria has just made the headscarf compulsory, and is preparing to recognise as citizens its supporters no matter where they had come from, but not its Syrian opponents, real or perceived.

Many of those supporters are Uighurs. What do those who think that Fu Manchu has been wasting his attention on Prince Andrew or on the scarcely less consequential Barry Gardiner have to say about that? We all know how bad the regime in China is. But that does not say anything for its enemies. Similarly, if loss of sovereignty to repressive regimes is wrong, and it is, then what is there to celebrate about the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership? Or, for that matter, either about Turkey's and Hungary's NATO, or about an EU the members of which were increasingly run by highly questionable characters? On the EU, we have stumbled across a rare difference of substance between centrists and right-wing populists, although that the latter revile it when they increasingly control it is as bewildering as the formers' continued enthusiasm for it. See also the the populists' dissent from the centrists' assertion that Georgia's foreign agents law was quite possibly a grounds for war, but openness to Elon Musk's colossal donation to Reform UK. So much for national sovereignty. From that to WASPI, on which the London media and thinktank Right would wish it to side with the Government as it wished on the two-child benefit cap and on the Winter Fuel Payment, Reform now has choices to make. It has made the good one twice before.