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New Labour has always been a party of extremely right-wing people who lacked the social connections to make it in the Conservative Party, and who had been brought up to spit on everyone else where they had grown up, but who had discovered in their first 36 hours at university that they were in fact nowhere near the top of the class system, a discovery that had embittered them for life.

Therefore, although Gordon Brown kept a lid on it, the Blairites have always wanted to replace benefits with vouchers that would not have been exchangeable for the alcohol, cigarettes or betting slips on which they assumed their parents' hated clients to spend every penny. Such is the voice of Paul Richards, who demands conscription for Ukraine and the imprisonment of critics of the war, egged on by Jacob Rees-Mogg. As ever, ignore anyone who advocated a military intervention unless you could imagine that person as an 18-year-old in battle.

And as ever, the call for war is coming from the liberal bourgeoisie, including the Liberal Democrats, the SNP, Plaid Cymru, Reform UK, and the Green Party. That is the class least likely to join the Armed Forces voluntarily, or to see combat even in periods of conscription. Operationally, that is of course just as well. But if there is not a strong enough case for conscription, then there is not a strong enough case for war. Unless a country needed to mobilise its entire healthy and able-bodied male population of fighting age, then it is not under sufficient threat to justify going to war at all. Having run out of men, Ukraine is now conscripting women. Germany would go the same way. As would Britain. At Holborn and St Pancras, the only way to vote in solidarity with the protesting German teenagers is to elect George Galloway.

That is also the only way to vote against the dehumanising, and administratively nightmarish, scheme of one of the biggest expenses claimants in Parliament, Helen Whately (née Lightweight), to reduce Universal Credit claimants, 40 per cent of whom are in work, to the old separate queue for free school meals, recipients of which are even now not always allowed everything on the menu. Speaking on behalf of the party of PPE, the Rwanda Scheme and the Bibby Stockholm, Whately seems blissfully unaware that the present benefits system differed from that bequeathed by Iain Duncan Smith and Esther McVey only in Keir Starmer's and Rachel Reeves's halving for new claimants of the Limited Capability for Work-related Activity aspect of Universal Credit, which was the only part of the whole edifice to require one to have proved, with the most extreme difficulty, medical unfitness for work. Disgraceful Labour MPs, persons described above, accepted that as the "compromise" to save PIP, which it can never be said too many times is an in-work benefit, without which many of today's taxpayers would be unable to work at all.

Hardly anyone smokes anymore, but every time that a claimant goes to the pub, then that supports someone's employment. Not that that happens very often on £50 per week. And as for gambling, successive governments have raised enormous revenue by insinuating it into every area of life, while third and fourth generation middle-class teachers in primary schools are to identify potential future NEETs so that third and fourth generation middle-class teachers in secondary schools might deliver to them a curriculum designed by and for local adult gaming centres, as well as local vape shops, phone shops, nail bars, tattoo parlours, carwashes, mini-marts, Turkish barbers, American candy shops, and lap dancing clubs, there being nothing else. In the absence of trade unions, no one would be able to come up through them to enter the political process, which would therefore be reserved for those who had followed Andy Burnham to Cambridge or Lucy Powell to Oxford and to King's College London.