Folk With Faith Left To Fight For It

By the so-called Rail Delivery Group’s own figures, one in eight tickets is still bought at a ticket office. Yet almost all of the ticket offices in England are to be closed, just because. But Britain alone has to have this model of railway provision, a model that after a generation, next to nobody still wants, yet which no party will consider reversing. It is bad everywhere, but it is worst in England.

For the same reason, England, alone in the United Kingdom and almost alone in the world, has to have privatised water. People from most other countries, including the United States, routinely refuse to believe that that exists, so absurd and so horrific is the entire concept. The reality fully confirms that assessment, and accordingly the huge majority of the supporters of all parties and none wants rid of it. Yet we have to carry on having it, just because.

And so to the seventy-fifth birthday of the National Health Service. The Fifth of July ought to be the United Kingdom’s national day, celebrated as fulsomely in this country as the Fourth of July was celebrated across the Atlantic. But instead, with horrible predictability, Tony Blair has been wheeled out out from wherever it is that he is kept, to demand more of the privatisation that he, Alan Milburn and Paul Corrigan brought from the outer fringes of the thinktank circuit to the heart of government in 1997. For the third time, though, only in England.

Keir Starmer and Wes Streeting are funded by the American healthcare companies, and no one doubts that Blair has an interest in them, or he would have made no intervention today. So much for his retirement. We should be so lucky.

Yesterday, following the formal exposure of his daughter’s grift that had always been visible from outer space, no one mentioned that it should never have been Colonel Sir Tom Moore’s job to fund the NHS, that centenarians doing sponsored laps of their gardens was no way to do so, and that we were back to the Bullseye of my childhood, with people playing for the money to buy equipment for their local hospitals. All three parties have been in government, so they are all to blame.

That is why general media overage today has been of the question of “whether we can still afford” the NHS. There has been much use of the obligatory, bone idle line about “the national religion”, the purpose of which is to suggest that the people’s overwhelmingly strong support for the NHS could not have the rational and empirical basis that the media, like the political parties, would lazily regard as the opposite of religious belief. As is their wont, the cancelled have been everywhere, with the deplatformed taking their usual place on every platform to canter around it their hobbyhorse of “social insurance”. But that more bureaucratic version of National Insurance is not the insurance peddled by their paymasters. Do not believe a word of it.

And Streeting is their man. Backed to the hilt by Starmer, he is the greatest threat to the NHS since its foundation. Aneurin Bevan would have called them “lower than vermin”. Bevan would never have made it onto the longlist for a Labour parliamentary candidacy under Starmer. Anyone who now expressed his opposition to prescription charges would be expelled from the Labour Party. Yet again, though, the only part of the United Kingdom to have prescription charges is England.

Did Bevan ever say, “The NHS will last as long as there’s folk with faith left to fight for it”? The world divides between those who insist that, since nothing exists until some luvvie says it or does it, that line originates in a 1997 television play by one Trevor Griffiths, and those who know that Griffiths got it from the old Bevanites in the Welsh coalfields during the Strike.

The miners were entirely matter-of-fact that they had heard Bevan say it on a number of occasions. That was why it appeared, as it still does appear, over his name and under his picture on numerous trade union banners and elsewhere. Those date from long before 1997, of all years. Aged 20 in 1997, even I had first heard it at least five years before that.

Therefore, “Nye never said that” is a shibboleth among those who were tellingly never told that you must never call him “Nye”. It is a vital dividing line between those who do, and those who do not, regard working-class culture, and therefore also working-class politics, as having any validity in its own right. It is always the sign of people who hate the NHS, and who hate the people to whom he did say it. 

Bevan said it repeatedly, even habitually, to the South Wales miners, and they put it on banners and so on even while he was still alive. Some London playwright or other eventually got it off them, but who cares? Avoid at all costs anyone who ever tries to tell you that somehow Griffiths made it up, a claim that I am not aware that he himself has ever made. That is the textbook definition of the metropolitan liberal elite. It is the mark of the enemy, and the enemy must be destroyed. And so we find our way back round to Starmer and Streeting.

But when I tell you that there is going to be a hung Parliament, then you can take that to the bank. I spent the 2005 Parliament saying that it was psephologically impossible for the Heir to Blair’s Conservative Party to win an overall majority. I predicted a hung Parliament on the day that the 2017 General Election was called, and I stuck to that, entirely alone, all the way up to the publication of the exit poll eight long weeks later. And on the day that Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister, I predicted that a General Election between him and Starmer would result in a hung Parliament.

To strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty, we need to hold the balance of power. Owing nothing to either main party, we must be open to the better offer. There does, however, need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not.