The NHS as a blueprint for depoliticisation

Kriminal Keir's woke plot for the Railways

Some of the handsomer Tory commentators like Fraser Nelson have noticed that Labour has essentially watered down it’s entire policy offering ahead of the General Election campaign. Ed Milibands Green £28bn plan has been shelved, Keir is attempting (and so far, failing) to water down promised workers rights legislation,

The explanation that Master Nelson offers for why Labour is watering these things down is twofold; Labour is performing so well that they do not need to offer anything radical to win, and that Labour is aware that in practice the country is basically bankrupt and they will not be able to afford these splurges, so it’s better to temper expectations. I do not dispute either of these points, the Gothic aspect of Gray-Starmerism is that, unlike with Corbyn, there is not even the mildest intimation that quality of life might improve through wealth redistribution towards the young. Keir’s pitch is that he will make us ‘secure’ and to keep us ‘safe’ from pain and political corruption. We will still be impoverished by fruitless genuflections towards Woke through bans on Oil and Gas licenses, etc, but students will still be trapped in to lifelong penury through student loans. I have more than a streak of affection for the maracas troupes and lentil dhal of Corbyn’s Labour; rule by Baroness Hale will be unrelenting drudgery.

If there is one policy that genuinely unites the leftists I have met with post liberals it is renationalisation. I am completely against this, as a cherished friend has noted, Peter Hitchens’s YouTube interview with Owen Jones in which he proudly acclaimed his desire for nationalisation set the right back by ten-fifteen years. The right to private transport must be absolute, the liberty of the motorised car must be defended at each and every junction; even to the extent that we make trains unusable. The Parkland Walk should be turned in to a dual carriageway; the corpse of the old trainline between Alexandra Park and Finsbury Park smothered in concrete forever. It thrills me! The rubber! It thrills me!

Labour’s recent policy document which discusses their plans for rail infrastructure, tediously titled as ‘Getting Britain Moving’, revealed that Labour would not be pursuing a complete nationalisation of the railways. The reason they gave for this was, as Fraser would expect, on the grounds of fiscal expenditure:

“With ten current rolling stock companies owning and leasing trains and carriages worth billions, it would not be responsible for the next Labour Government to take on the cost of renationalising rolling stock as part of our urgent programme of reform” - Value For Money

Rest assured; for all this talk of Radicalism, Keir is tempered with pragmatism. They might talk a big game about inequality, but when it comes down to actually governing, they will only implement small, obscure changes like closing the ‘non-dom loophole’ and going after private schools. The bloke on the commuter train heading in to the city reading his FT raises his eyebrows. Yeah, it’s credible.

But dig a little bit more in to this document, with a sceptical eye, and you’ll find propositions, obscured by strange obfuscations, to permanently destroy the ability of Democratically elected governments to control aspects of the State.

What is a ‘shadow directing mind?’ you ask yourself?

The Secretary of State will become a ‘passenger-in-chief?’ What does that actually mean?

Ah. So now we have the truth of it. Labour’s radicalism on the Railways has nothing to do with public or private ownership - the part that the public actually cares about. Their plan is to make the Railway ‘operationally independent’. The revolution they want to bring in is about changing the structural relationship between the democratically elected Secretary of State and a new executive body; ‘Great British Rail’. The cabinet minister will not have any role in the operational running of the Railway at all; but will instead hold Great British Rail ‘to account’, instead of ‘micromanaging’.

This has been done before, in Healthcare, through the creation of NHS England by Lansley’s 2012 Health and Care Act. If Northern Ireland was the testing ground for the replacement of majoritarian rule with devolution, the NHS has been the testing ground for usurping ministerial authority with unaccountable bodies. NHS England was the first ‘quango’ that did not just act as a frustrating appendage to government but acted to supplant it in its entirety. Ministerial departments, like the Department for Health, were criticised for ‘micromanagement’, healthcare was no longer to be a ‘political football’.