THE Labour Party, as it exists now under Keir Starmer and Health Secretary Wes Streeting, is not the party to save the NHS — and this is not a new phenomenon.

In fact, Starmer and Streeting appear to be barely interested in going through the motions of even pretending to want to save it in any meaningful form. Last September, Streeting, who has even raised “self-care” by patients as a measure to be considered for the NHS, went as far as saying he was prepared to let the NHS “die” if it failed to adapt to his “reforms,” which amount to further privatisation, the closure of hospitals and cutting costs, while also mandating prescriptive and even coercive use of drugs on the general population to keep them out of hospital, and pushing the perversely incentivised “integrated care” model even harder than previous Tory governments, under the economically illiterate threat that the NHS will “go bankrupt” if the “reforms” are not imposed.

This plan was crystallised even further in the report Streeting commissioned by Lord Darzi, an ardent advocate of Tory NHS “reform” who oversaw much of Tony Blair’s marketisation of the NHS, to write last autumn on the future of the NHS.