United Healthcare

MAGA has never claimed to be noninterventionist. The hawkishness towards China and Iran may be difficult to square with the attitude to Russia, and the threats to NATO Denmark over Greenland and to the de facto American colony of Panama over the Canal Zone may sound like jokes, but you never know with Donald Trump.

And imagine that half of Canadians really did want to join the United States. They don't. But imagine that they did. They would be like the half of people in Northern Ireland who wanted to join the Republic, but only if they could keep the National Health Service, as is now the official policy even of Sinn Féin, one of whose MPs was General Secretary of the Royal College of Nursing until May of this year.

There is never going to a North America-wide extension of Canadian Medicare. There just isn't. But the people who wanted an all-Ireland NHS might get it. In three parts of the United Kingdom, the NHS is as absolutely sacrosanct as public opinion would overwhelmingly wish it to be in the fourth. The debates over Scottish independence, Welsh independence, further Welsh devolution, and a United Ireland, are conducted in terms of what would be best for the NHS.

Yet in England, at least when it came to who was allowed a hearing, we must make do with Wes Streeting, the Conservatives, the other party to the Coalition, and Reform UK. It is massively unpopular privatisation that is non-negotiable, with the only discussion being about how to get there. Only England has prescription fees, and no one who officially exists even thinks that that is odd.

Anyone could guess who was paying for this, and if you look it up, then that is exactly who you find. But while I carry no candle for Luigi Mangione, his instant transformation into a folk hero, which could only be cemented by any outcome to the proceedings against him, suggests that there would be an even more forthright reaction from a people whose NHS, having existed almost throughout living memory, were to be handed over to the successors of Brian Thompson.

Polling now consistently shows Streeting losing his seat to the Independent Left, with no suggestion that being Prime Minister would save him. On the Labour Right, his stock is already falling because of his opposition to puberty blockers and to assisted suicide.  He should be hoping that no one in liberal corporate America had noticed, and seeking its employment as soon as possible.