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The Liberal Democrats and UKIP should pledge to repeal the Health and Social Care Act
Ed Miliband, Andy Burnham, and the whole of Labour have pledged robustly that a direction to repeal the Health and Social Care Act (2012) will be made in the first Queen’s Speech of a new Labour Government.
It is said that David Cameron and Nigel Farage are to be issued with a joint challenge to declare that they will rule out any attempt to repeal the ban on foxhunting if they form a pact in the event of a hung parliament.
Evan Harris on 6 March 2012 identified the impact that the Lansley legislation would have to turbo-boost marketisation and privatisation of the NHS.
He warned Liberal Democrat colleagues not to touch it with a bargepole:
“It has no friends among even the non-party-political royal colleges, and has no mandate in those areas where it goes beyond the coalition agreement. The political impact will be to retoxify the Tory brand – which they are welcome to do, of course –, but also, by association, to damage the Lib Dems.”
The assurances given by Lord Clement Jones have turned out to be hollow:
“In putting down amendments, we have no hostility to competition as such, merely a desire to make use of the opportunities that the TFEU and European competition law offer member states to avoid the NHS being treated like a utility, such as gas and electricity.
Under the EU treaties, Article 106 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union states:
“Undertakings entrusted with the operation of services of general economic interest … shall be subject to the rules contained in this Treaty, in particular to the rules on competition, insofar as the application of such rules does not obstruct the performance, in law or in fact, of the particular tasks assigned to them”.
Member states have certain discretion as to which services are services of general economic interest. By ensuring healthcare services for the purposes of the NHS are services of general economic interest and that the “task” of co-operation between services is “assigned” to the healthcare providers, it should be possible to provide some protection from less desirable aspects of competition law.”
This year saw Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust awarding G4S Integrated Services a £3.9 million contract to provide domestic cleaning, portering and catering support across its property portfolio. The three year agreement, with the option to extend for a further year, will see G4S initially delivering services to 34 sites across Peterborough and Cambridgeshire, with further locations likely to be added in the future. Cleaning will be provided across the contract, with additional portering services and catering support at some specific sites.
Privatisation does not require a complicated definition. It’s simply the transfer of public sector resources into the private sector. Even the late Sir Keith Joseph, widely thought to be “brilliant” by the late Margaret Thatcher herself, and who was thought to be the principal “architect” of Thatcherism, ended up trying to keep afloat businesses in the public sector rather than privatise them. This was during his time as Secretary of State for Trade and Industry.
There is generally a feeling that the Coalition government, a joint enterprise between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats, went much further in privatising the NHS than the Thatcher government even dared to. And the worst aspect of this was there was absolutely no inkling that this would happen. There was no mention of this even in the Coalition Agreement of 2010.
There is no official policy by UKIP on the NHS yet.
This is absolutely staggering. The late Tony Benn used himself to warn people against voting for people who are ‘false prophets’. UKIP seem alarmingly reluctant to acknowledge the number of people from black asian minority ethic background who actually work for the NHS and bring value to it everyday.
It is now felt that there is quite a high chance of a ‘hung parliament’, although Labour activists are desperate to fight for a Labour government at Westminster with a healthy majority. It appears that the mainstream right-wing press have given up the ghost, in the form of David Cameron.
It is curious why the Conservative Party haven’t ditched their leader, like they did famously in 2010, but the most parsimonious explanation is that it would make sense to find a new leader after the expected catastrophe of the 2015 election. Ditching Cameron now might mean that they would have to ditch a new leader further in 2015. Besides, the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats have become a tried and tested product as far as the City are concerned.
The current Government, and people who sail with her such as BoJo, have fiercely defending the City’s interests in Europe as far as banker bonuses are concerned. They have resisted the ‘Mansion Tax’, which is widely thought to be introduced by Ed Balls as Chancellor in the first Budget of a Labour Government, as a windfall tax to produce a cash injection into the NHS. Furthermore, the City still has lucrative contracts in the form of the private finance initiative which have yet to be renegotiated properly from this Government; and also they have been very successful in promoting social impact bonds, the PFI equivalent for social enterprises, with the current Government which has used mutualisation to Trojan horse rent seeking in response to Mid Staffs.
Certain dividing lines have now got to be laid for the sake of the public good.
I feel that it is essential that David Cameron, Nick Clegg, and Nigel Farage are to be issued with a joint challenge to declare that they will rule out any attempt to resist the repeal of the Health and Social Care Act (2012).
Nigel Farage, for all his faux socialist credentials, seems unseen to resist formally the privatisation of the NHS; in fact his henchmen over the years have prided themselves on the ‘efficiency’ of the private sector, despite the growing allegations of fraud and inefficiency from the outsourcing companies used by the current government to deliver the smaller State.
Nick Clegg not only has a PR problem; he has a major issue with the content of what the Liberal Democrats stand for. It is widely known that there is discontent about his party’s ‘differentiation’ policy, which has seen the Tories and the Liberal Democrats telling the voters why each other party is clearly unfit for government. The charge sheet against the Liberal Democrats, including a weak economy (not enough till receipts from income tax to fund public services), demolition of legal aid, privatisation of NHS, misery for a mass of disabled citizens through botched welfare reforms, is substantial.
As a minority party, the Liberal Democrats would be asked to repeal the Health and Social Care Act (2012) which is possible but simply weird. It is clear that the Liberal Democrats, Conservatives and UKIP are clearly capable of running the NHS into the ground.
A lot of energy was put into fighting the Liberal Democrats on the toxic firestorm hospital closure clause, clause 119, which the Liberal Democrats were instrumental in protecting. Norman Lamb, for all his soothing words, has been the Minister of State in office while social care has imploded; the social care budget has not been ring fenced, coincidentally, since 2010.
There was a popular joke on Twitter this year that turkeys joked, “It’s like humans voting for UKIP”.
David Cameron, if he is still leader in 2015, or whoever is in charge of that toxic brand, will clearly be in no position to repeal the Health and Social Care Act (2012). The least worst option is that the Liberal Democrats and UKIP should pledge not to resist the repeal of the Health and Social Care Act (“Act”), but the hope is that a strong Labour government will have renewed vigour in assessing the political weather. Even better, they should pledge to repeal the Act.
That is, the component of the private sector in the mixed health and care economy has gone way too far. The health and care sectors should never be run anywhere for the benefit for shareholders offering care in 15 minute slots or below the minimum wage. The health and care sectors should not be so fragmented as they are now. People should be collaborating with each other to offer excellent clinical care, not competing with each other.
The vote is the most critical weapon of influence any of us has. Even more than ever, it is vital that it is used wisely.
You wouldn’t get a plumber to mend your fuse box. so why would you let Farage near the NHS?
I saw up close and personal how some people vote in elections. My mum asked me to work out how to package her postal vote using the declaration, ‘envelope A’ and ‘envelope B’. Whilst I did not actually see how she did the vote itself, I did ask my mum how come she did the vote in seconds.
“It’s what I always vote.”
I can well believe that. She attends, like many, the NHS – in her cataracts. She will have a procedure done on the NHS, and yet I know she has very little in how the NHS works.
She has only ever attended our local A&E in London with me very infrequently. We had to queue for hours, but we put this down to being infrequent attenders, ‘being unlucky’, ‘to be expected’ etc.
I bet you if that if you were to ask my mum about section 75, or clause 119. If you asked her about Jos and the other Lewisham campaigners, she would immediately start smiling though.
That nice man, Nigel, is possibly a man you might like to have a drink with, particularly if you liked drinking. I definitely do not wish to imply he’s a problem drinker, despite wishing to be down the pub during the day.
But in much the same way you wouldn’t like a plumber to mend your fuse box, the chances are you wouldn’t like UKIP to run the NHS.
You might be tempted ‘to give them a go’, particularly if you feel the elections do not matter.
But the factors stopping you voting from UKIP require you partly to have decided that they would be incompetent at running the NHS.
It is incredibly difficult to work out what the official UKIP policy on the NHS. It appears that they’re in favour of the usual corporate memes of ‘private sector efficiency’ – for all we can tell they would have been in favour of section 75.
They appear to be in favour of free trade, but not necessarily as a member of the European Union. I have never heard them voice an opinion on the EU-US free trade treaty investor protection mechanisms. This may or may not change the landscape of how multinational corporates can take over running of bits of the NHS, and get away with it.
Nigel Farage simply fell apart in his interview with Andrew Neil, but I don’t suspect many people in the general public watched it carefully. I know my mum for example couldn’t care less that his tax policies, i.e. how you pay for the NHS, are simply incoherent.
So I don’t particularly need to make a rational argument that Nigel Farage and UKIP running the NHS would be like getting the presenters of BBC News to do complicated brain surgery.
They might win a sizeable proportion of the vote, but, when it comes to the general election, their offerings on health, education, world affairs, benefits, home affairs, and foreign policy will mean they will never be asked to form a government.
They keep Question Time and Any Questions amused, as well as other current affairs programmes, and I dare say they’ll do sufficiently well in the European Elections to ensure they continue being invited to perform their hopeless skit.
But it would take an earthquake of some sort for my mum to wish to vote for them. That’s why I don’t think they’ll make it.
If the NHS is a sacred cow, it is possibly about to sacrificed at the altar of a UKIP-Tory coalition.
In between elections, some of the electorate leave it up to Polly Toynbee to construct a forensic dissection of the section 75 Regulations on competition and choice in the NHS, or park a discussion of inequality at the foot of a major tome on the subject by Thomas Piketty.
The Guardian readers of North London therefore pride themselves on their immaculate understanding of their world. They occupy the tents of St. Paul’s Cathedral, or protest about tax on Oxford Street.
Who’d then have thunk of a novel way of influencing democracy through the good old-fashioned ballot box?
It sometimes seems that every cappuccino sipping intelligentsia fluent in every investor protection clause of TTIP can lay the blame of every evil at Andy Burnham’s door, without offering anything constructive to help Labour run the National Health Service from May 8th 2015.
If there’s a protest vote to be had, it should go to the nice anti-establishment man who went to a minor public school.
You can’t simply get enough of him on Question Time, LBC, or the Andrew Marr Show.
Just a pity you have absolutely no idea what UKIP stands for, in terms of the National Health Service.
The arithmetic might easily work out that UKIP come first with the Conservatives third, with the Labour Party coming second. Then it won’t matter that Andy Burnham MP has just returned from Strasbourg to try to negotiate some exclusions for us for the EU-US trade treaty.
It won’t even matter that Jeremy Hunt MP has failed to bring the long-awaited reform of clinicians, at Draft Bill Stage from the English Commission to combat scenarios such as Mid Staffs, before parliament.
Can it really be that the NHS is a spectator sport for the general public, where anyone who talks about the NHS is some crackpot, fringe ‘special interest’ group?
Isabel Hardman writing in the Spectator on 20 September 2013:
“Paul Nuttall MEP is about as different a Ukipper as you can get from Nigel Farage. He’s a bald Liverpuddlian, for starters. This means he can appeal to a different section of the electorate, and one that as Fraser said earlier, Farage needs to attract. He told the conference that Labour voters are ‘easy pickings’, adding:
‘It’s clear now ladies and gentlemen that Ukip is now the official opposition to Labour in the North of England.’”
The usual defence for atypical UKIP opinions is that every party is choc-a-bloc with wackos and nuts, so any extreme, offensive opinions are to be tolerated – an argument used at full throttle from Nigel Farage, UKIP leader, this morning on “The Andrew Marr Show”.
But clearly Nuttall believes in what he is saying. Besides, Paul Nuttall is the UKIP MEP for North West England, UKIP Deputy Leader.
Paul Nuttall MEP indeed talks about the NHS, or rather the privatisation of it, with great fondness:
“I would like to congratulate the coalition government for bringing a whiff of privatisation into the beleaguered National Health Service. The fact that successive governments have undertaken what they call ‘substantial’ changes to the NHS should tell us all we need to know: there is something fundamentally wrong with how we treat the ill in our country.”
“Beleaguered” in what sense? Possibly he means the NHS is at ‘death’s door’ having had its reputation totally destroyed by the UK media.
Or maybe he means that spending for the NHS actually fell in real terms last year, as has been pointed out in a letter to Jeremy Hunt by Andrew Dilnot CBE much to the disgust of the current Government.
“The NHS is the second biggest employer in the world, beaten only by Walmart, but as with all state monopolies, it is costly, inefficient and stuffed with bureaucrats. In New Labour’s NHS, for every nurse there is a manager and vital workers, such as midwives, are falling in numbers.”
Except the NHS, prior to privatisation, has been considered to be one of the most efficient healthcare systems in the world.
“The problem, however, goes far deeper. I would argue that the very existence of the NHS stifles competition, and as competition drives quality and choice, innovation and improvements are restricted.”
Ah – that wonderful policy plank called ‘competition’, the poster boy of neoliberalism, which has been one of the biggest disasters in English health policy ever, and which has even been called “killing the NHS“.
This is no time for hyperbole, of course.
“Therefore, I believe, as long as the NHS is the ‘sacred cow’ of British politics, the longer the British people will suffer with a second rate health service.”
If the NHS is a sacred cow, it is possibly about to sacrificed at the altar of a UKIP-Tory coalition.
What have UKIP got to say on the NHS?
Hugh Muir may have just done an extensive synthesis of the faults of UKIP, but their party is still expected to do very well in the forthcoming European elections.
On the UKIP issues website, it is declared that:
“The NHS and state education strain under a population increase of 4 million since 2001.”
Clearly free movement of persons/workers is going to be a major issue for UKIP in discussing the NHS, but it would be sheer folly to ignore the large numbers of workers from ethnic minorities groups which work day-in and day-out for the NHS.
That sentence on NHS and state education is the only formal mention of the NHS on the “Issues” page.
However three other things are mooted.
“Open GP surgeries in the evening, for full-time workers, where there is demand.” This is of course a perfectly sensible policy if resources allow.
“Locally-elected County Health Boards to inspect hospitals – to avoid another Stafford Hospital crisis.”
This of course could be seen as dogwhistle politics too.
Despite Jeremy Hunt’s regular mentions of Mid Staffs, the current Government has failed to introduce before parliament a draft Bill on the regulation of health professionals, proposed by the English Law Commission – and time is running out.
And in the voluminous Health and Social Care Act (2012), there is no clause on patient safety – apart from the one abolishing the National Patient Safety Agency.
The discussion around patient safety essentially revolves around budgeting and safe staffing, not local health boards. Section 44 of the Mental Capacity Act 2005, legislating on wilful effect, did exist at the time of many of the possible offences at Mid Staffs.
“Make welfare a safety net for the needy, not a bed for the lazy. Benefits only available to those who have lived here for over 5 years.”
This runs the risk of ‘dog whistle politics’, as nobody reasonable would dare to call the whole community of disabled citizens ‘lazy’.
However, a useful account of UKIP’s main policies on health are provided by Keith Rowe here.
But there are still glaring gaps – such as what is UKIP’s view on the current expenditure in the private finance initiative? It appears that UKIP has waged war of sorts on multinational corporates. Cynics might say this has been a means to capture the Labour vote. Others say that this is not a general war on finance, particularly given Farage’s stockbroker background.
Many people intending to vote UKIP are not intending to vote UKIP in the general election. But the question is why are they voting for UKIP at all?
It could be that they have been whipped up into a media hysteria, which issues such as the NHS simply can’t generate.
But this explanation is quite unlikely – given, for example, the intensity of discussion around the NHS when Question Time visited Lewisham.
And, frustratingly for supporters of the NHS, UKIP do not spend much time discussing the quite damaging effects the investor protection clauses of the EU-US free trade treaty might have.
This has been left to other parties, including Labour, the Green Party, and the National Health Action Party, to discuss.
I sincerely hope this blogpost has not been too friendly – as Patrick O’Flynn, Communications for UKIP, has said in the past: “With enemies like you, who needs friends?”
Why the National Health Action Party doesn't need its own 'Country Club Bore'
There is apparently a consensus around Westminster circles that Nigel Farage is ‘the Country Club bore’, a slightly red-faced jovial, charismatic man who doesn’t particularly mind speaking shit.
While such people appear pleasant, often their messages are not entirely trivial. The same criticism has been made of ‘Bungling Bojo’ i.e. Boris Johnson, that behind the buffoonery there is quite an incisive mind who politically astute. The Left, which has been accused previously of lacking a sense of humour by notorious funnyman Jeremy Clarkson, appears not to have its own ‘nice buffoon’. Maybe it’s because buffoons are supposed to have posh accents and smile a lot – though Tony Blair did have a posh accent, and smile a lot.
UKIP policies simply don’t add up. I have previously thought that UKIP could equally appeal to the left, in that Labour also has a proud history of wishing to leave Europe. The recent accusation that ‘UKIP means “racists for posh people” has been violently criticised by UKIP who cite that the last thing that they are are racist (either even having members from ethnic minorities themselves, or having members who are married to people from abroad.) They don’t have a single MP, and yet they are given a huge amount of air time. People often joke on Twitter that tonight it is ‘Nigel Farage Nigel Farage Nigel Farage Nigel Farage Nigel Farage #BBCQT”.
Emulating the secret of Nigel Farage is, though, difficult if you’re a “single issue party”. Nigel Farage is very different to Caroline Lucas, or Natalie Bennett. One suspects you would never get Nigel Farage voting against the section 75 NHS regulations, even though one also suspects that Farage wouldn’t know what these regulations are even if his life depended on them. However, Nigel Farage has been an effective ‘Trojan horse’ for getting his immigration issues a lot of air time. The National Health Action Party would probably love to have the media dominance which has been secured by UKIP, but the last thing the National Health Action Party needs at this time their own equivalent of a ‘Country Club Bore’.
However, the National Health Action Party, I feel, should think carefully about what sort of impression they wish to create. There is a huge amount of goodwill and affection to the NHS from traditional voters of all parties, and Dr Clive Peedell and Dr Richard Taylor could not do much worse than to present themselves as a modern day Alec Douglas-Home. The patrician view of the NHS consultant, who spends most of his time on the golf course (which is of course completely untrue), would go down like a lead balloon with the electorate.
Also, it has a very serious dialogue to have with the electorate, on the future of the NHS, who “owns it”, who it “works for”, and who is deciding policy for it. The enactment of the Health and Social Care Act (2012) was one of the most disastrous steps to increase the democratic deficit ever to take place in England, when it became clear that this current Government is much more interested in having behind-closed-doors conversations with private healthcare providers than members of the medical Royal Colleges or the BMA, for example. Sure, the the National Health Action Party needs to represent faithfully the views of all healthcare professionals including nurses, as well as Doctors, but it also needs to represent ordinary members of the general public. Dressing up in theatre scrubs or donning a medical stethoscope, akin to a low-budget RAG project, may not be the best way to project a serious image, but the election in Eastleigh was a real eye-opener in how the media could completely ignore NHS issues.
Whilst it is tempting to spend a lot of time and energy in wondering why the BBC have steadfastly refused to cover the NHS reforms, to be frank the discussion of the NHS’ journey of late has been scant and pathetic for a very long time. Members of the public are generally aware of the private finance initiative, but seem generally unaware of the major advances in this initiative during Major’s short stay in government. Likewise, people are generally unaware of the impact of NHS Foundation Trusts, what ‘efficiency savings’ are, or what the failure regimes of NHS hospitals means. The social media can do so much, and it is incredibly disheartening to hear Liberal Democrats whining in the House of Lords about how much ‘misinformation’ has emerged from the social media.
The basic issue is that the social media is the only mechanism many people have for discussing the NHS at all, and neutering this device is in nobody’s interest apart from powerful corporates. While the National Health Action Party may not have its equivalent of the “Country Club bore”, I am sure that they are putting maximum effort into thinking which seats they wish to target, what their core message is, what they feel the basic understanding of voters on issues to do with the NHS might be, how they’re going to get their message across, and what they feel their ideal outcome is. I think they should drag themselves away from the philosophy of the ‘focus group’ made popular by New Labour, but lead on what they think is right. This could include populist issues, of massive public policy concern, such as patient safety, which no traditional party has had a moral licence to pursue.
Labour must indicate what its 'red line' issues are before 2015
Like it or not, there is now a sense that ‘anything goes’ in general elections. It could be that the arithmetic returns a Coalition government, where the Conservatives can only be in government with support of UKIP, or Labour can only govern with the support of the Liberal Democrats. Of course, the most preferred option for Labour members would be for a Labour government to be returned with a landslide.
The current coalition is what can only be described as a ‘miserable compromise’. As a result of the Conservatives continuing to be in denial that the explosion in the deficit had been caused by injecting money into the banks as an emergency measure in the global financial crisis, Labour still have difficult in making the case for safe management of the ‘nation’s finances’. This is of course extremely frustrating for Labour, since the facts are that Labour ran a deficit comparable to the tenure of Norman Lamont and Ken Clarke otherwise, and George Osborne, assisted by the Liberal Democrats, has managed to reverse a fragile economy into a double-dip, and now possibly a triple-dip recession, only saved by some creative accounting over the Olympics and the 4G receipts, as revealed by George Eaton.
In civil litigation, all parties are supposed to adopt a “cards on the table approach”, and given what has happened in the past, all parties should make clear, I feel, what are “red line issues” for them; in other words, what is unnegotiable. Labour might definitely wish to repeal the NHS act and to reverse Part 6 of the Act, UKIP might wish to withdraw from Europe, and the Liberal Democrats might wish to [insert a reasonable choice here]. The combined total of Conservative and UKIP polling figures suggests an alliance would significantly narrow the difference of popularity between the two parties. David Cameron has, in fact, promised the Conservatives will fight the 2015 general election as an anti-Europe party in a bid to see off the threat of UKIP. The Prime Minister delighted Conservative MPs last night when he pledged he will fight for his first overall majority from a ‘clear Eurosceptic position’. However, the chance of UKIP gaining a significant number of seats is still small. They are also dependent upon the continuation of the Eurozone crisis in order to maintain their popularity.
However, we can only really draw conclusions from by-elections, albeit they may fall under the ‘mid-term protest vote’ umbrella. According to Andrew Sparrow’s “live blog”, Nigel Farage is quoted as saying the following:
“It’s a big advance. It’s our best every byelection result. I said at Corby two weeks ago that Rotherham would move us on further. We’ve got a good, active local branch here. We fight local elections here. We are well known. The fostering row didn’t hurt our vote. But I rather agree [that] whilst people were very upset and outraged by it, not that many people changed their vote purely on that issue.”
No prime minister has improved his party’s vote share since October 1974, which is a bit of a special case anyway. The election of February 1974 had produced a hung parliament. Harold Wilson went back to the country soon afterwards to ask for a stronger mandate, repeating a tactic he had pulled off in the 1960s. The Liberal Democrats’ decision to frustrate boundary changes which Conservative high command regarded as vital to their chances of victory at the next election still is troublesome. Indeed, not all Conservatives have given up hope of getting the boundary changes through the Commons. Senior Tories have vowed to press on with changes to constituency boundaries, saddling taxpayers with a bill for £12 million, even though the Liberal Democrats have vowed to stop them going ahead. However, the Liberal Democrats have reason to wish their heels in. Tom Clark, also in the Guardian, provided a comprehensive overview of why the AV referendum was lost, with this as the no. 1 reason:
“1. If the lack of a hate figure was the gaping hole for the yes side, Nick Clegg provided an unbeatable one for the noes. The man himself recognised that voters wanted to poke him in the eye, and he dutifully kept a fairly low profile in the campaign that was by far the most visible single concession that he obtained from the Conservatives. Shrewd as it was for him to go to ground, it could not prevent the noes from warning that “President Clegg” would be kept forever in power by everybody’s second preferences. He had a horrendous hand to play last year, but he made things worse for himself by appearing to the country as a head boy thrilled at being unexpectedly tasked with helping to run the school. When the headteacher and his staff meted out their long-planned litany of horrors, it was not they but Clegg who felt the force of the pupils’ revolt. Having once dismissed Gordon Brown’s pre-election promise of an AV referendum as doomed by association with him, there is a bitter irony here. It is not association with Brown but association with Clegg that has now sunk the electoral reform he was so desperate to achieve.”
Richard Reeves, the Lib Dem leader’s senior strategist and speechwriter, has now left. Reeves, the ultimate in tong-term strategists, had personally worked out the three-step programme to see the leader through to 2015. First, the Liberal Democrats would share the spoils of a recovering economy, “after the mess that Labour had left”. Then they would move into the “differentiation” phase. Finally, they would set out their own agenda prior to a smooth disconnect at the election. The first phase is perceived to have gone well by loyal Liberal Democrats and Nick Clegg, though Labour members still think that much legislation from the Conservatives has only been enabled through Liberal Democrat votes on the NHS, education support allowance, legal aid reforms, to name but a few. Few people in Labour have sympathy with Sarah Teather, who was sacked as minister for families in September, appears to have found some reservations.
“But she also makes no bones about the fact that, for her, the cuts and caps already agreed by the coalition are unacceptable and wrong. Brent, she points out, is an area with high rents where many people are already living in appallingly crowded conditions. She is in favour of that part of government policy which encourages people off benefits into work but not when it seeks to erode sympathy and support for the poor. “Having an incentive in the benefits system to encourage people to work is a good thing,” she says. “It is a good thing because it encourages people to participate in society. But having a system which is so punitive in its regime that it effectively takes people entirely outside society, so they have no chance of participating, crosses a moral line for me.””
However, such late confessions may not be sufficient for her seat to be saved ultimately. As regards “the economy stupid”, the Bank of England now thinks it is likely the UK economy will contract in the fourth quarter of 2012, with governor Sir Mervyn King predicting a “zig-zag” road to recovery thereafter. It recently downgraded its forecast for gross domestic product (GDP) in 2013 to around 1 per cent, while the UK government’s tax and spending watchdog is not much more optimistic, at 1.2 per cent.
So, quite unbelievably, Ed Miliband and Labour might be able to win the 2015 general election in some form or other, and as per usual the policy review is still under way. However, Labour could reap much political capital by saying what it definitely will not do, given that most of the most damaging actions of this Government were not set out in front of the electorate prior to May 2010 (the £2bn NHS restructuring for example). The danger is that, if Labour actually does win a landslide in 2015, it will not use this as an opportunity to reshape a definition of the UK, away from misguided marketisation of “New Labour”, but towards a society where citizens can aspire to be fully employed in salaried work and where the genuinely vulnerable are not troubled by securities over the health and social care for example. Nick Clegg’s pathological hatred for Gordon Brown and Labour may be ‘water-under-the-bridge’ if Labour does need to work with the Liberal Democrats, but it could be that Ed Miliband states that one red line he does not wish to cross is to work with Nick Clegg.
