On Reflection

Barry Gardiner is a class act, having told Newsnight that Keir Starmer versus Wes Streeting would be, “an argument between Narcissus and his reflection.” The challenger was always going to be Streeting, and the announcement has been made formally in and by, of course, The Guardian, which insults its readers with the assertion that Streeting, “has shifted away from the right of the Labour party on key issues.”

Streeting has brought back Alan Milburn as part of his life’s work of completing the privatisation of England’s NHS, a process begun by Milburn and by Paul Corrigan under Tony Blair. He is firmly with almost all Labour and other MPs in regarding five per cent unemployment as neither a failure nor an accident, but as something to be engineered and celebrated, as it has been and as it is being, since the fear of destitution is fundamental to their control of the rest of us. Tell us again how there cannot be both mass unemployment and galloping inflation. There can be, there is, and from the point of view of the people responsible, there is supposed to be. They are the Heirs to Blair, whom Margaret Thatcher identified as her greatest achievement.

There can be opportunistic departures from all that, but only temporarily. Labour MPs executed 180-degree turns, first on the withdrawal of the Winter Fuel Payment, and then on the cuts to sickness and disability benefits, at least for now. Those were non-negotiable until they were not. MPs are preparing to do the same on the two-child benefit cap, and apparently also on the WASPI women, since there is only one politically feasible outcome to that “review”. All those carefully practised sad faces for nothing. But they will have to get them out again soon enough, although not on increasing the basic rate of income tax, which the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats, and Reform UK should all be asked, not whether they would oppose, but whether they would reverse in office. We know what the answer would be, and it would probably be the same from the sitting Green MPs.