Consultation, Exercise

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 consultants, your pay from the currency-issuing State has not kept pace with inflation, then you have a legitimate claim. By striking for a rate of pay that retained the most committed and engaged staff, they are striking to save the National Health Service.

Strikes are supposed to be disruptive, and arranging them to cause the most disruption is fundamental to them. Strikes in the NHS do not, in themselves, pose 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. Even the deliciously demoted Yvette Cooper, who has severely damaged my own already fragile health and that of millions of other people over the past 18 years before targeting me personally last year, so that my support for any action against her is not merely wholehearted, but downright fanatical. However much she said that this strike would cost, what would otherwise have been done with that money? It is clearly available, so use it to settle the dispute.

The existential crisis in the NHS is not being caused by this strike. This strike is being caused by the existential crisis in the NHS, which goes back to the Blair Government's signature domestic policy of privatising it 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. Only Andy Burnham has ever privatised an NHS hospital, but in September 2009 he modestly proposed that the NHS should be its own preferred provider. Peter Mandelson's and thus Jeffrey Epstein's Progress wrote to Burnham to protest that he was "restricting the use of the private sector in the NHS", and using its eponymous magazine to opine, not only that "With an election approaching, Labour has regrettably adopted anti-market rhetoric on health", but that, "The pro-market principles espoused by Andrew Lansley are the right ones." Was it proscribed? Who was expelled?

Burnham's position was called "profoundly worrying", and its endorsement by Unite was branded "insulting and ignorant", by the Deputy Chief Executive of the Association of Chief Executives. Don't laugh. All right, do. But that person was Peter Kyle, like his former Cabinet colleague Anna Turley a member of the same salon that gave a grateful nation Joe Docherty, Matthew Doyle, Phil Woolas, Dan Norris (whose proxy vote the Labour Whips have pointedly stopped casting since Parliament most recently resumed), and Kyle's close friend, closest ally, former lover, and constituency predecessor, Ivor Caplin. And who was the salonnière? None other than Mrs Corrigan. Think on.