Reform or Die?

Keir Starmer has read Lord Darzi's report, and will be announcing more of the same, only in an even more extreme form. "Reform" always means "privatisation and cuts". It is called "Reform" because it is what Nigel Farage would do. 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. That said, even Farage turned up to vote to save the Winter Fuel Payment, and even he drew the line at voting to keep the two-child benefit cap.

Leanne Mohamad's near miss at Ilford North will go down as the great disaster of the 2024 Election, the narrowly lost chance to save the National Health Service in England. Tony Blair is back, Alan Milburn is back, and the 10-year plan for the NHS is being written by Paul Corrigan. In 1997, those three brought the concept of NHS privatisation 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. The new intake of Labour MPs has been carefully chosen to be sound on this highly lucrative issue.

Labour's 1997 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 Wes 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.

Back when Milburn was running a Newcastle Trotskyist bookshop called Days of Hope, known to its clientele as "Haze of Dope", it was obviously costing far more than it could possibly have been making, but it clearly suited someone's purposes to have a distraction from the Communist Party bookshop down the road. Yet in 1979, Corrigan was a parliamentary candidate for the Communist Party. Think on.