Bad For Our Health

Hospital consultants do not grow on trees. Every one of them in this country has earned that eminence while also owing it to vast expenditure on the part of the National Health Service.

For all its many faults, private education is not the kind of complete parasite on the State that private healthcare is.

Moreover, it has produced many of the best of the Labour Party, of the wider Labour Movement, and of the wider Left.

A left-wing politician or "commentator" (I dislike that word in this context), as distinct from a common or garden Labour machine politician or attendant journalist, is vastly more likely to be invited to address a private Sixth Form than to address a state one.

Indeed, the best-known such figures are invited to address private Sixth Forms on a very regular basis, and they do so.

It is Labour's greatest achievement that if any one of us were hit by a car, or had a heart attack in the street, then someone, even a perfect stranger, would dial 999 without a second thought, and an NHS ambulance would take us to an NHS hospital.

Even if we had all the private health insurance in the world. And doesn't the private health industry know it?

Therefore, at this very moment, in the persons of Owen Smith and Reg Race, that industry is mounting an aggressive attempt to take over the Leadership of the Labour Party.

It intends to turn that party into the vehicle for the privatisation of the NHS in England, which is the only part of the United Kingdom where that could ever be attempted.

Initially, that would be by non-resistance to the schemes and activities of Jeremy Hunt. But the intention is to return to the days of Tony Blair's and Alan Milburn's "radicalism", and then to surpass even that.

We must be anything but non-resistant. Defending Jeremy Corbyn is the only healthy option.