Job Lot

HCRG Care Group, formerly Virgin Care, has been awarded a £1.3 billion contract to deliver all community health services on behalf of the Bath and North East Somerset, Swindon and Wiltshire Integrated Care Board. A joint bid by NHS providers was rejected. This has been announced on the day that it has been made known that Alan Milburn was to be appointed as lead non-executive director of the Department of Health and Social Care.

The 10-year plan for the NHS is being written by Paul Corrigan. In 1997, Milburn, Corrigan and Tony Blair brought the concept of NHS privatisation from the outer fringes of the thinktank circuit to the heart of government. Since then, it has been the policy of all three parties except under Jeremy Corbyn, and of most Labour MPs and all Labour Party staffers continuously. The new intake of Labour MPs has been carefully chosen to be sound on this highly lucrative issue.

Labour's 1997 pledge card had promised to abolish the NHS internal market, and the final week of its campaign had been a countdown of days to save the NHS. Those were barefaced lies, and the opposite of the truth. Here we are again. Except that Wes Streeting is perfectly open about his bought and paid for intentions. He seeks and accepts such income streams because he agrees with what they stand for.

Back when Milburn was running a Newcastle Trotskyist bookshop called Days of Hope, known to its clientele as "Haze of Dope", it was obviously costing far more than it could possibly have been making, but it clearly suited someone's purposes to have a distraction from the Communist Party bookshop down the road. Yet in 1979, Corrigan was a parliamentary candidate for the Communist Party. Think on.

Elsewhere in the jobs market, Sue Gray's position as Envoy to the Nations and Regions looks set to be quietly dropped. At a stately 67, she will instead be given a hefty payoff and a peerage. We in the provinces will not be living in the Gray Areas after all.

And the crackdown on MPs presenting television programmes may not deprive the viewers of GB News of Lee Anderson. It will certainly not deprive them of Nigel Farage. GB News pays Anderson £100,000 per year, slightly more than his MP's salary, but still higher. He may decide that his MP's expenses would make it worth his while to keep his seat on the benches rather than on the sofa, but Farage's income from Sir Paul Marshall is very nearly that much per month, so about a million pounds per year, and unlike Anderson he was on that channel before he ever became an MP. Since his election, Farage has voted only five times, and only twice on anything with legislative effect.

Be in no doubt, then, that Farage would chose GB News over Clacton. Why would he not? Losing his newly vacated seat in a byelection would be quite the blooding in for his latest party. Even with him, its only possible gains would be from Labour, such as here at North Durham, and in most of those not very numerous cases, again including here, they could be made only by coming through the middle of split left-leaning vote. Without Farage, Reform UK would make no gains anywhere, and indeed lose its existing seats. To save it from that, would he take a significant loss of platform, and a colossal cut in income?