RISHI SUNAK is holding urgent discussions with NHS management on how the health service will cope through the winter, given chronic staff shortages and ongoing industrial disputes.
Day by day the scale of deterioration of the public estate caused by 13 years of reckless spending cuts becomes clearer. The collapsing Raac concrete behind the crumbling schools crisis turns out to be present in hospitals too, and even in Parliament itself.
This is the context in which Tony Blair wades into Labour’s policy debate to caution against raising public spending. Blair is not bothered by the similarity between Keir Starmer’s policies and those of Rishi Sunak: he argues that this is positive since it suggests a political consensus.
It does. Behind the smokescreen of party-on-party insults Westminster is now a palace of consensus.
The 2015-19 years in which voters were offered a choice between different political visions are long gone, something Blair welcomes, praising Starmer for smashing the Labour left, arguing that Jeremy Corbyn was taking the party to the brink of extinction.
Consensus now reigns on the NHS, where both parties oppose higher spending and back greater reliance on the private sector.
It applies to public spending, with Labour claiming there can be no “big government cheque book” for public services at a time when corporate profits are through the roof.
It has a chokehold on foreign policy, where both parties are committed to escalating the Ukraine war and compete to scaremonger over a nonexistent threat from China.
The problem with all this consensus is that it does not reflect public opinion.
Polls show majorities in favour of renationalising rail, mail, energy and water, yet in this supposed democracy the majority opinion of the electorate counts for nothing.
People want corporate profits reined in, windfall taxes on energy, wealth taxes on the rich.
Nor are our rulers confident of public support for their warmongering foreign policy — hence the crude efforts to control opinion through banning foreign-owned media outlets and threatening MPs who step out of line with excommunication.
The political consensus in favour of the same privatisation and cuts agenda we have suffered under for 13 years has been imposed.
It is policed so fiercely precisely because the same Corbyn accused by Blair of bringing Labour to the edge of ruin in fact built it into the largest political party in western Europe and, in 2017, raised its vote share from 30 to 40 per cent in just two years, the biggest vote share increase the party had achieved in seven decades and one which saw it win more votes in England than Blair did in his 1997 landslide.
Yes, the story was very different two years later — but because of a concerted effort by British state and ruling-class institutions, from the media to MI6 to the majority of Labour MPs, to wreck a political project that threatened their wealth and power.
Despite all this they have not manufactured consent. People know hospitals need more staff and more beds, and that “technology” alone is not going to solve their problems.
Blair, like Starmer, plugs new technologies as some kind of alternative to public investment.
He is right that politicians need to get to grips with the AI revolution — but not to impose digital ID cards on every citizen as he advises, but because technology is being used to impose unprecedented levels of surveillance on workers and to undermine their jobs, pay and conditions.
Ultimately the question of whether technology will improve our working lives and public services, or simply raise the rate of exploitation, depends on what it always did — ownership and control.
Blair’s beloved consensus keeps ownership and control of our economy in the hands of the few. It is high time the labour movement looks to ways to burst that consensus apart.
