Wes Streeting « Labour Uncut

Posts Tagged ‘Wes Streeting’

Miliband would be a lousy pick for Chancellor

05/07/2026, 10:44:46 PM

As speculation about Andy Burnham’s pick for chancellor intensifies, Ed Miliband’s name consistently rises to the top of the betting odds. A former special adviser to Gordon Brown after 1997 and then chair of the council of economic advisers at the Treasury, he is eminently qualified.

But there’s a problem. He’s been weighed and measured in the court of public opinion over the past 15 years and voters have long since made up their mind about Edward Samuel Miliband.

And they just don’t like him.

He shafted his brother for the Labour leadership. He couldn’t eat a bacon sandwich. He cosied up to Russell Brand, trying to look cool during the 2015 general election. Before standing next to a piece of granite with his top ten policies carved on it. He’s weird.

It’s not fair, but there it is.

Miliband has two interconnected problems. The first is that he has enormous public recognition. According to YouGov’s tracking poll, 94% of the public knows who he is.

Normally you would assume that’s an advantage for a politician. Alas, his second problem is that 51% of voters can’t stand him. (I refer you to my opening paragraph. Alea iacta est. The die is cast).

So, Andy Burnham would be wise not to provoke the public by making Miliband his chancellor of the exchequer. The role is about politics, not economics. Selling the government’s case on the economy. The cost of living – and Labour’s lamentable ability so far to do much about it – is going to define the outcome of the next general election. Whoever Burnham picks needs to speak the public’s language.

Miliband’s undoubted academic intelligence is not matched by similar emotional intelligence. His record as a bossy energy secretary – who seems immune from the public’s frustration over enduring the highest energy bills in the West – is surely a disqualification from being appointed chancellor, when this government is going to stand or fall over the issue of living standards.

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Labour has lost the plot

14/05/2026, 01:20:00 PM

In a parallel universe, a Labour government is basking in the publication of a well-balanced legislative programme and getting on with the business of government after a decade-and-a-half in the political wilderness.

Alas, we dwell in the political equivalent of a skip fire. Is Labour still a serious party?

We will doubtless find out over coming days, but it’s worth scanning over yesterday’s King’s Speech to see what might have been.

‘Strengthening our economic security,’ with the nationalisation of the steel industry, a major new rail line connecting our key cities in northern England and a Bill to get closer to the European Union.

Then there’s ‘Ending the opportunity crisis,’ – long overdue reform to the leasehold system and a crackdown on chiselling ticket touts.

And three themes prefixed by the word ‘strengthening’ (a favourite Starmer term) ‘reforming the state,’ ‘energy security,’ and ‘national security.’

This is all decent Labour fayre – practical measures about the people’s priorities – and in less crazy times would be getting a positive write up.

The obvious point is that we are not in normal times, with Labour openly flirting with political obsolescence.

The other point is that which of the potential Starmer replacements would demur from the agenda set out yesterday?

A leadership contest where there are no policy differences of substance is the very definition of the ‘narcissism of small difference.

What a self-indulgent, conceited monster we have become! Barely two years into government Labour’s ages-old pathology towards regicide shows no sign of abating.

Given we may be weeks away from food shortages and fuel rationing, Labour’s timing in plunging itself into a nihilistic fug merely hardens the voters’ impression that we have lost the plot and are incapable of addressing their problems.

In seeking to save their hides, panicking Labour MPs should consider the possibility that they are actually offering them up.

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Labour’s three recent, unforced errors are far more serious than the Budget furore

08/12/2025, 08:46:35 PM

by Rob Marchant

While Westminster has been alight with chatter over whether or not Rachel Reeves misrepresented the facts in the run-up to her Budget, events have been happening in parallel which are likely to have a far longer shadow for Keir Starmer and his crew. Indeed, they are situations which, if left as they are, will continue to have brutal repercussions long after they all leave office.

The first was Wes Streeting’s announcement last month of the puberty blockers trial, due to kick off in the New Year.

When the Cass report landed in April last year, campaigners looking to protect Britain’s children from the harm of untested medicines were surely so overjoyed to see that thousands of lives could be protected from likely sterilisation and severe health problems in later life, that less focus was given to one of the report’s other recommendations, on the smaller number children which it recommended be recruited for a clinical trial, to finally put a stop to any debate on the efficacy of said treatment.

It seemed churlish to complain about this matter of the fine print, when the main battle, over ceasing the general puberty-blocker programme, had already been won. But now the last grain of sand has fallen into the bottom of the egg timer and the trial, which it was easy to blithely assume would never start, is about to begin.

This means that 226 children will be legally taking the same drugs which have been declared illegal for thousands of others diagnosed with gender dysphoria. To recap: these drugs have never been approved for this use; the treatment is experimental, with some horrific side effects; and consent cannot be meaningfully given by minors as young as 10, most of whom are too young to have experienced pubertal changes, let alone sex.

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Wes Streeting is right. If Labour is going to save the NHS there needs to be a serious debate about its future

07/01/2023, 10:27:51 PM

by David Talbot

The NHS is so central to British politics that a vague promise to provide it with more funding, festooned across the side of a bus, helped to sway a referendum of vital national importance. Such was the potency of the claim, which spoke to voters’ deepest passions, and indeed fears, about the NHS, that whilst voters believed Brexit would be bad for the economy, they had believed the Leave campaign’s claim of more funds for the health system in a post-Brexit Britain.

The pledge was indisputably incorrect, and horrid – but ultimately effective – politics. Little or no precious national debate was directed towards just what the funding ought to be directed towards, nor whether more long-lasting reform was required beyond the perennial resources argument.

That may be, of course, because ‘the NHS’ and ‘crisis’ has become the white noise of British politics. As an editorial in the BMJ pointedly stated: “The current media frenzy over the latest NHS crisis prompts speculation on how the NHS might end.” The caveat, however, is the editorial was written in 1999.

The Shadow Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, has lamented that the NHS is not “the envy of the world” and that “it is a service, not a shrine”. He has been lambasted from the predictable bastions of conservatism, the far left and the BMA. It did, though, signal a welcome, and long overdue, injection of realism from the Labour Party into the NHS debate.

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