Tuesday 10 July 2018

A Healthy Change

Quips have been doing the rounds about the things that Jeremy Hunt might seek to privatise now that he is Foreign Secretary. But he did not invent NHS privatisation. That idea was a fringe oddity, confined to people who felt betrayed by the moderation and restraint of Margaret Thatcher. Until the General Election of 1997.

Overnight, Tony Blair, the erstwhile Trotskyist bookseller Alan Milburn, and the sometime Communist Party parliamentary candidate Paul Corrigan, turned the privatisation of the NHS from an idea at or beyond the outermost limits of political life, into the all-party consensus that it then remained for 18 years until the media were forced to acknowledge the existence of Jeremy Corbyn.

Corbyn's mere presence has, among other things, created a new such consensus, in which the only dispute is over which taxes to increase in order to fund the NHS more, not over whether there should be either any such tax increases or any more such spending. And Jeremy Hunt has been moved on. So far, that has possibly been Corbyn's greatest achievement of them all.

But the Blair-Milburn-Corrigan Tendency is still there on the Labour benches. And there is going to be another hung Parliament. We need our people to hold the balance of power in it. I need £10,000 in order to stand for Parliament with any chance of winning. My crowdfunding page has been taken down without my knowledge or consent. But you can still email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com instead, and that address accepts PayPal.

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