Mission Delivery

Believe Wes Streeting. Labour is to be allowed back into office because it is once again the most promising vehicle for the privatisation of the National Health Service. In 1997, Tony Blair, Alan Milburn and Paul Corrigan brought that from the outer fringes of the thinktank circuit to the heart of government. 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. In 1997, Labour’s pledge card had promised to abolish the NHS internal market, and the final week of its campaign had been a countdown of days to save the NHS. Those were barefaced lies, and the opposite of the truth.

Here we are again, except that Streeting is perfectly open about his bought and paid for intentions. He seeks and accepts such income streams because he agrees with what they stand for. Labour is a party of extremely right-wing people who lack the social connections to make it in the Conservative Party, and whose two defining experiences were being brought up to spit on everyone below them, which was everyone else where they grew up, and discovering in their first 36 hours at university that they were nowhere near the top of the class system, a discovery that embittered them for life.

Another such is Rachel Reeves. Labour opportunistically pretended to oppose the abolition of the 45p rate of income tax, the only mini-Budget measure that had not been in Liz Truss’s prospectus to Conservative Party members, but it supported every single one of the others. Had Kwasi Kwarteng’s loony list ever been put to a Commons vote, then the Labour whip would have been to abstain. While calling themselves PopCons as ostensible adults, certain people are looking for a Trusssite Restoration. They are looking in the wrong party.

To answer Streeting’s call for NHS privatisation, the Today programme had on Richard Tice to call for NHS privatisation. Centrism and right-wing populism are con tricks to sell exactly the same economic and foreign policies to different audiences by pretending to wage a culture war. Reform UK has only ever obtained a parliamentary seat by defection, when Lee Anderson was told to take one for the team in order to distract attention from who had in fact succeeded in winning a seat under his own name and under the banner of his party while Reform’s candidate had come sixth.

Yet no one from the Workers Party of Britain is ever invited onto anything to talk about policy, for fear of their mentioning, say, the non-existence of Streeting’s “spare capacity” in the private sector, with its NHS-trained staff. Under him, they would be paid, if not necessarily very well, out of billions of pounds’ worth of public contracts, while NHS staff would be told that there was no money to pay them properly.

The Workers Party’s target voters do not read The Times or the Daily Telegraph, and there is that interchangeability of centrism and right-wing populism again. Those may therefore print whatever they liked about it or about George Galloway, provided that they were prepared to pay the damages again, for all the electoral impact that that would make. If the broadcast news networks picked it up, then that would expose the same essentially corrupt relationship that lavished airtime on Reform. Reform exists only in the Telegraph and on GB News, with fewer councillors in the whole of Great Britain than are enjoyed in Northern Ireland by its new electoral partner, Traditional Unionist Voice. Between that and the Assembly seat that Jim Allister won for it, TUV ought to be regarded as the senior partner, so do look it up. Like TUV’s 10 councillors, Reform’s nine are fewer than those in many an Independent or Residents’ Group on one local authority.

But Reform supports everything from NHS privatisation to the continued supply of arms to Israel, via the endless attempt to take over the fabulously wealthy National Trust by people whose politics were hardly those of Octavia Hill, John Ruskin, F. D. Maurice, Henry Mayhew, Dame Henrietta Barnett, Sir Robert Hunter or Hardwicke Rawnsley, figures of whom those professed defenders of history have obviously never heard, and if you do not find that funny, then there is something badly wrong with you. Yet it would still be wrong to laugh. This is about the ruthless pursuit of greed, from the repeatedly failed coups in the National Trust, to the arms trade even when it results in the use of British-made weapons to murder British alms workers (who, if it matters, were military veterans with WASP names and WASP faces), to the openly intended asset-stripping of the NHS.

As in 1997, the frontman does not quite put the lower into lower middle class. Most people would assume the factory and the land to have been in Keir Starmer’s family for 100 years by the time of his birth in 1962, and his Sir to be one of those Victorian or Edwardian industrial baronetcies. After the First World War, those Liberal dynasties went two ways, often within the same family, and the Starmers, it would be supposed, became Fabians. A private school, but not one of those. An Oxbridge degree, if only eventually, although Leeds also has quite a posh side, both as a city and as a university. The Bar, which is always popular with that sort. A constituency named after two Tube stations. It all makes such perfect sense that there is no reason to look too hard.

Yes, Starmer effectively advocates NHS privatisation by having Streeting as Shadow Health Secretary. Yes, Starmer effectively advocates Trussonomics by having Reeves as Shadow Health Secretary. And yes, Starmer has expressly advocated the starvation of one million children and of half a million women in Gaza, a strategy that necessitates the bombing of aid convoys. But on policy, his general lightness is fundamental. He has something much bigger in mind. Just as he has never sought to outargue the Labour Left politically or philosophically, but has instead deployed the Rule Book to kick it out from Corbyn down, so as Prime Minister he would seek to restore as much as possible of the order that obtained between Blair and Brexit, much of which in fact pre-dated 1997 and most of which is still in place on paper, while simply criminalising in law and in practice anything like the dissent from it that first seriously manifested itself with the emergence of Corbyn in the summer of 2015, before exploding in, as and from the 2016 referendum result.

Vast areas of public policy, including the NHS in the form of a “Mission Delivery Board”, would be handed over to heavenly bodies that it would be illegal to attempt to influence. For example, the Office for Value for Money would be the last nail in the coffin of democratic political control over economic policy, while Community Payback Boards would deliver professional-managerial class justice in the raw, and those two changes would not be coincidental. Starmer is completely open about all of this. As with Streeting, believe him.

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.

I have no plan to join the Workers Party, although nor would I expect to stand against it. If, however, it did not contest North Durham, then I would. 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. We have made a start.