Healthy Politics?

Keir Starmer has announced more public money for private healthcare. This country's horrifying level of chronic illness is what comes of low pay, bad nutrition, poor housing, the inability to see a doctor or a dentist, and the hospital waiting lists that trebled in the 14 years that the National Health Service paid £150 billion to private healthcare providers, which are also generous contributors to politicians. There is no "spare capacity" in British private healthcare. It is moonlighting NHS consultants meeting as much commercial demand as happened to present itself. Starmer and Wes Streeting propose only to present vastly more of that demand. They must be stopped.

But instead, both on this and on social care, they want "a cross-party consensus" defined by the faithful regurgitation of the material produced by thinktanks that were funded by those who sought to profit, or to profit even further. Alan Milburn and Paul Corrigan are both back. They and Streeting are expecting such useful contributions from the Conservatives, from their erstwhile partners in the Coalition of Austerity, and from the first party to have been founded as an electoral vehicle for that network of thinktanks, yet which has managed to acquire a very different electoral base. Over, then, to the Conservatives, to the Liberal Democrats, and to Reform UK. Or do they exist to realise the defining domestic policy aspiration of New Labour?