Thursday 1 September 2016

National Health

The Old Labour areas decided the EU referendum in favour of Leave, and TTIP has duly been abandoned. That is world-changing stuff.

Whatever the reasons were for the right-wing Leave vote, absolutely nothing has come of them. Or ever will. But TTIP is already gone.

For something like 10 years, the Old Labour vote in the North of England has been treated by everyone, now even including an extremely Southern Conservative Prime Minister, as the pure soul of the nation, the support of which somehow carried a greater moral authority than anyone else's.

Of course, the logic of that is that Labour really ought to have won every General Election since well before the War.

But then, everyone who despises John Major logically thinks that Labour ought to have won in 1992, while everyone who despises David Cameron logically thinks that Labour ought to have won in one or both of 2010 and 2015.

One tends to assume that a country's class, regional and partisan complexities are lost on the wider world.

Until something happens such as, let us say, the more or less immediate abandonment of a trade deal involving half the global economy because the Old Labour vote in the North of England had gone one way rather than the other in a referendum.

Ah, the National Health Service. The EU or anything else can do whatever it likes to any other aspect of British life, but see what happens when it threatens the National Health Service.

The English are starting to wake up to the fact that the NHS as it existed from the 1940s until the Blair years still does exist in all three of the other parts of the United Kingdom, and is at least the principal reason why two of those remain in the United Kingdom at all.

A Secretary of State who can bring the doctors out on strike is singularly incompetent. And note the public support. For a strike by the doctors. That is how much the NHS matters to the public.

Plus the sense that at last someone, somewhere is sticking up for the old ways such as time and a half on Saturdays, which everyone else let go without a fight, indeed without even noticing awfully much until it was too late.

All of this needs to be harnessed. We have not heard the last of toxic trade deals.

But we will soon have heard the last of Pharma Smith, and with him of Labour's, although certainly not of Jeremy Corbyn's, baleful record on NHS privatisation over the last 20 years.

And perhaps even sooner, we could have heard the last of Jeremy Hunt. If not to help in bringing about that happy outcome, then what is the largest political party in Europe for?

1 comment:

  1. We need you in Parliament. You should have been there since 2005.

    ReplyDelete