Take Back Power

Apple crumble is itself a national treasure, so the effrontery of throwing it at the Crown Jewels is off the scale. Take Back Power says that it wants a permanent citizens’ assembly with the power to “tax extreme wealth and fix Britain”. There already is one. It is called the House of Commons, and that it largely has the wrong people in it is a reason to replace them with the right people, as can and should be done.

Yet the Crumblies will no doubt be voting for Zack Polanski, whose view that “Most working-class people who are truly working-class don’t own a car at all” recalls Cyril Smith’s defection from Labour to the Liberals because the appearance of cars outside council houses had led him to conclude that the whole Socialism malarkey had gone too far. The Greens still support the NATO that has effectively collapsed because the United States has withdrawn in all but name, and they still support the war in Ukraine that is approaching its only ever practicable end. They have records in office in Scotland, Brighton and Bristol.

The Greens also used to want to ban halal meat, until it was pointed out that on the same principles they would have had to have banned kosher meat as well. There is something similar that could be said about the Haredim and the two-child benefit cap, the lifting of which would no more be a subsidy to Islamic polygamy than to men who had children with several different women without going through any purely religious ceremony. That is hardly uncommon, and the Haredim, the majority of British Jewish children in 10 years’ time, do not do that.

On that cap, what says Lord Offord? A Minister until the last day of the previous Government, Offord was a supporter of Kemi Badenoch’s Leadership campaign, but now says that Reform UK has “the vision of how to govern Scotland with a right-of-centre agenda”. Conservatives who join Reform are beyond “My party has left me”. Reform has joined them. On both sides, it looks as planned as the sudden rise of Polanski.