Everything Clegg does he loses. Now is probably an excellent time to get him to campaign for NHS privatisation properly. Nick Clegg’s party, with the help of Baroness Williams and competition law loving members of the House of Lords, helped to get on the statute books one of the most corrosive statutory instruments for the NHS ever.
No ‘worm’ is needed to tell you that.
But if you’re talking about worms, Clegg was bringing up Farage’s rear for most of the evening.
And, as for the other YouTube metric, Farage won hands-down, although there were no ‘knockout blows’.
Nigel Farage did have two tricks up his sleeve which were interesting from a socialist perspective, ironically a few hours before Tony Benn’s funeral at Westminster.
Farage railed against free movement of capital a number of times, making loud anti-corporacy noises.
This is highly significant as the growth of the multinational, even beyond the increasing provision of NHS services by the private sector, has been a major concern for many NHS campaigners.
There has been a tendency for NHS campaigners to focus on the battles of the past, rather than anticipating the battles of the future. However, the campaigns that some campaigners have fought, for example on section 75 or clause 119, have gone very well despite the end-result (an artifact of our parliamentary system).
Battles yet to be fought are what happens on hospital closures in the next parliament and whether multinationals manage to overcome ‘barriers to entry’ in private care. Another battle to be fought is whether Labour, if elected, manages to implement unified personal budgets merging health and social care budgets. This could be just the Trojan Horse for private providers many in the private sector have been looking for, although Labour are keen to point out nobody is actually wishing to implement this. But the runes are there, and I suspect the Labour 2015 manifesto will be as vague and imprecise on this as possible.
There is nver going to be a LBC battle between Clive Peedell and Nick Clegg, or similar, but an hour on the NHS would be interesting. The media have never considered the future of the NHS as fertile an areas as immigration, as evidenced by weekly media political debates, but such a debate would be incredibly interesting.
What tonight did establish was though a very uncomfortable truth. That Nick Clegg is now so toxic it’s untrue is going to be hard for the Liberal Democrats to contain. He is as in tune with voters’ concerns as leaders of leftie think tanks including Neal Lawson of Compass are as tune in with the concerns of most experts in health policy. Whilst it might be able to drop bits of jargon such as ‘coproduction’ and ‘accountability’ into strategically placed letters in the media, if the resulting letter has the intellectual gravitas of the Teletubbies nothing is going to come of it.
Everything Clegg touches turns to tin, whether it’s the AV referendum or boundary changes, and so it goes on. With his lucky streak, he should be encouraged to team up with Baroness Williams and other Liberal Democrat Lords, and finish the job they’ve started: the privatisation of the NHS. With their losing streak, and the public’s resentment against them, this final heave could stop the NHS being privatised for good.
