Rank and File

No one complains when the Education Secretary has never worked in education. No one complains when the Health Secretary has never worked in the NHS, which is the largest employer in the country. Yet it is considered objectionable that the Defence Secretary has never been in this country's tiny Armed Forces, which are that size even though Britain has the sixth largest military budget in the world. Don't ask, don't tell. What good has it done the Armed Forces to have had a succession of khaki fetishists as Secretary of State?

A Health Secretary with some experience in the field might have avoided the coordinated strike action by the junior doctors and the consultants, action that is both utterly unprecedented and absolutely correct. You do not have to be poor to be right. If your pay has not kept pace with your private employer's profits, then you have a legitimate claim. Or if, like the NHS doctors, your pay from the currency-issuing State has not kept pace with inflation, then you have a legitimate claim.

There are things that are too big to fail, and then there is the National Health Service. Since the situation has been 15 years in the making, then all three parties that have been in government during that period need to explain how things have reached this stage.

Strikes are supposed to be disruptive, and arranging them to cause the most disruption is fundamental to them. The parties are bewildered at the popularity of the increasingly successful strikes, to the point of denying it, and of outright lying that strikes in the NHS posed a threat to life, as if Aneurin Bevan, of all people, had never thought to put the necessary safeguards in place. I'll give you a clue. He did, so they are. The NHS flourished in the glory days of British trade unionism. Strikes have always been planned for. There is no threat to patient care, and any Health Minister or informed commentator knows that in detail.

Labour is firmly committed to the Blair Government's signature domestic policy of the privatisation of the NHS in England. That idea existed only on the fringes of the thinktank circuit until Tony Blair, Alan Milburn and Paul Corrigan took office in 1997. 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.

Other than Blair, Milburn and Corrigan, no one has done more than Jeremy Hunt to privatise the English NHS, but to the glee of the liberal-capitalist commentariat, Wes Streeting has openly sold the pass. NHS privatisation would now face no Official Opposition of even the most notional kind. Keir Starmer has endorsed Streeting's views, effectively naming Streeting as his successor in the course of the next Parliament, at the end of which Starmer will be 67 to Streeting's 46.

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.