Unhealthy

With rail use at its highest since the 1920s, it would seem that public support for public services was increasing rather than decreasing.

Yet today, the party of Beveridge will assist in ramming through Parliament the dismantlement of the most valued of them all, the NHS, in England; in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, they still get to live in somewhere that it is recognisably Britain, but here we are the guinea pigs in the never-ending crazy experiments of the think tank teenagers.

Whereas the creation of the NHS was in all three manifestos in 1945, this vandalism was in none of them in 2010, since no party with any such manifesto commitment could expect to win even one single, solitary seat. It over-flatters the Conservatives to accuse them of ideology here. This is happening for no reason except to placate the people who funded their General Election campaign, and whom they want to keep the cash flowing.

If anyone is ideological about this, then it is the Orange Book Lib Dems. Oh, and the Blairite rump in the Labour Party. If David Miliband had become Leader, then this would have gone through on the nod, as most things did in the last Parliament, because no one stood up to demand a division on them. But thankfully, the Leader of the Opposition is not an Heir to Blair.