Healthy Interests

First things first. As no stranger to surgery, if those who engage in male homosexual acts are to be permitted to give blood, then who will be next? Intravenous heroin users? Why not? The only concern here is the security of the blood supply. There is absolutely nothing else to consider. So the answer must remain No.

Now, to the NHS more broadly. The statutory responsibility of the Secretary of State simply is the National Health Service. We stand on the cusp of its abolition as always desired by Tony Blair and Alan Milburn, despite its having been in all three manifestos in 1945, despite its expansion and its stalwart defence by Enoch Powell, despite its having been looked after by Conservative far more often than Labour Governments until 1997, and despite the fact that until after the 2010 Election Conservative health policy, simply by staying what and where it had always been, had been significantly to the Left of New Labour's for as long as there had been any New Labour either in Opposition or in Government. Andrew Lansley was far, far better in Opposition.

Andrew Lansley, late of the SDP. Like, of course, his nemesis, Shirley Williams. The creation of the SDP was premature. Had fire been hanged until the Electoral College had delivered the Leadership to Tony Benn, then the new party would have included over half of Labour MPs, most Labour peers, at least one and probably both of Labour's former Prime Ministers, huge numbers of councillors and activists, several unions, and most or all of the Labour-supporting newspapers. Thus would have been moderated the betrayal of Gaitskellism over Europe, the enthusiasm for nuclear weapons, the decadent social libertinism of Roy Jenkins, the comprehensive schools mania of Shirley Williams, her regret at not having resigned in protest at past Labour attempts to restrict immigration, the Alliance with the practically Bennite constitutional agenda of the Liberal Party, the appeasement of Scottish and Welsh separatism, the Jimmy Carter-like Friedmanism at home and Cold War sabre-rattling abroad, and the exactly wrong response to Thatcherism and Trotskyism in the Limehouse Declaration's call for "more, not less, radical change".

But it is difficult to believe that Shirley Williams, Bill Rodgers or even David Owen has any desire to "renew" Trident. And would any of them oppose the requirement that, in order to have any effect in the United Kingdom, all EU law pass through both Houses of Parliament as if it had originated in one or other of them? Or that British Ministers adopt the show-stopping Empty Chair Policy until such time as the Council of Ministers meets in public and publishes an Official Report akin to Hansard? Or the disapplication in the United Kingdom of any ruling of the European Court of Justice or of the European Court of Human Rights (or of the Supreme Court) unless confirmed by a resolution of the House of Commons?

Or the disapplication in the United Kingdom of anything passed by the European Parliament but not by the majority of those MEPs certified as politically acceptable by one or more seat-taking members of the House of Commons, so that we were no longer subject to the legislative will of Stalinists and Trotskyists, neo-Fascists and neo-Nazis, members of Eastern Europe's kleptomaniac nomenklatura, neoconservatives such as now run France and Germany, people who believe the Provisional Army Council to be the sovereign body throughout Ireland, or Dutch ultra-Calvinists who refuse to have women as candidates, soon to be joined by Turkish Islamists, secular ultranationalists, and violent Kurdish Marxist separatists? Or even, at least in Owen's case, the restoration of the supremacy of British over EU law, and its use to repatriate agricultural policy and to restore our historic fishing rights in accordance with international law?

Owen has called on Ed Miliband to renounce Blairism and return to traditional Labour values, and he has expressed the hope that he will feel able to rejoin the Labour Party before he dies. Robert Skidelsky, having broken with the Conservative Party over the bombing of Kosovo, and when not actively involved in Balanced Migration, has recently published Keynes: The Return of the Master. George Cunningham (where is his peerage?) still lists the SDP as his party on the list of former MPs retaining House of Commons passes. And Shirley Williams is leading the charge against the Coalition's abolition of the NHS.

Ed Miliband, over to you.