Jeremy Corbyn should have proved his anger on the TV debate

Progressive change in England ain’t gonna happen – not in our lifetimes. On the night, Corbyn, despite his left credentials, was unable to challenge the “market’s best” narrative that underpins and undermines almost every aspect of English civic life. In fact, just like Blair and Brown before him, he didn’t really try. Of course, his case wasn’t helped by Labour’s festering internal warfare, his own non-position on Brexit and weirdly squinty specs.

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But the core problem was none of that. Corbyn is either unable or too feart of England’s Conservative electorate to lay out a passionate, convincing, alternative social democratic vision of Britain when given the opportunity. That could cost him the election, end all prospects of a fair society via Downing Street for Scottish Labour voters and quash Unionist hopes of keeping Scotland in the Union.

I realise that’s a lot to lay at the door of a pleasant-enough guy who’s rolled out some eye-catching ideas including more public ownership, free broadband, £10 living wage and a four-day working week. Labour’s manifesto, launched today should go further and promise to dismantle the NHS internal market.

But did you hear any of that on Tuesday night?

Hardly.

Corbyn had one strong moment when he waved the US/UK trade negotiators document at Boris Johnson, and concluded to some applause: “You’re going to sell out our NHS to the United States and big pharma.”

That’s indeed a terrifying prospect, but it’s been rehearsed for weeks and overshadows the equally terrifying fact that the English NHS is already privatised to within an inch of its life. True, in the ITV debate, Corbyn called for an end to privatisation and criticised legal action by private companies affected by democratic health board decisions.

But Corbyn needed to MAJOR on this and spell out the myriad ways in which the English NHS and other public services are bent completely out of shape by decades of underfunding, competition and private provision. He didn’t.

The SNP’s excellent Dr Philippa Whitford will likely do that for him on Question Time tonight, even though England’s NHS is not her main concern.

In a recent blog she outlined the unbelievable constraints facing the health service south of the Border: “Outsourcing under the Health and Social Care Act 2012 (HSCA) has fragmented the English system, replacing collaboration with competition. This market wastes billions of pounds every year and, with Labour’s PFI legacy, sucks funding from frontline services and drives NHS Trusts into debt, leading to the closure of beds, A&E departments and even hospitals.”

It gets worse.

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“This [marketised system] has caused a marked decline in emergency care, with NHS England’s performance against the four-hour A&E target consistently lagging 9-10% behind NHS Scotland. The drastic reduction in hospital beds means patients lie on trolleys in corridors for hours, and common operations like joint replacements and cataract surgery are rationed by unjustifiably high symptom thresholds.”

And here’s the gobsmacking bit: “Patients refused surgery can pay for treatment through the NHS ‘My Choice’ system because hospitals (in England) can make up to 49% of their income from paying patients. Not only does this create a two-tier health system in England but undermines the basic premise that the NHS is based on NEED not personal income.”

THIS last shocking paragraph takes just 15 seconds to speak aloud. So why did Jeremy Corbyn not say this or something like it, or reveal the Tories have failed to deliver a net increase of 5000 GPs they promised in 2015 when Boris Johnson started reeling off his list of fantasy investments?

Why didn’t Corbyn rain down details and examples – joining the dots to let voters see that England’s worst-ever A&E stats arise directly from the wastefulness and competition of a marketized NHS?

Fa kens. It’s always easy to be wise after the event, and ITV’s strange debating structure limited each leader to one-minute contributions with 30-second supplementary answers. But Corbyn should have broken those rules, proved he’s passionate and angry about scandalous abuse of the NHS and doubtless animated swithering Labour voters far more than Boris with his arid “two referendums in one year” scaremongering.

But that didn’t happen and it won’t.

Corbyn may lift his game in the remaining debates, but it’s clearly not his style to get tore in. Fair play. He didn’t expect to win the Labour leadership race and thus arrived in the top job without repeatedly standing for office, honing his message, winning over opponents, learning to wield power, making tough decisions and creating an authoritative, powerful TV persona. Those rough edges are part of Corbyn’s appeal to Momentum supporters and traditional English Labour voters. But it’s not them he needs to persuade.

Boris Johnson comes from much the same “insurgent” stable, but possesses what Corbyn does not – an overwhelming ego, that lets him cut through media constraints, break rules and assert himself easily. Johnson’s entitlement and posh-boy background not only equip him to drone on with provocative, breath-taking lies, but actually impress many English voters, who believe in the myth of “strong leaders” as forcefully as the naive hope that Britannia will once again rule the waves.

The grim reality is that Boris was rated twice as prime ministerial as Corbyn by viewers of the debate, not despite his arrogance, but because of it. A significant proportion of English voters evidently believe a complete indifference to the opinion of others is an essential prerequisite for any prime minister. Leadership is Etonian. That’s how bad the crisis in English democracy has become, and Labour would need a truly charismatic person, an extremely cunning gameplan, or a different electorate to succeed – one instinctively receptive to ideas of equality and repelled by the thought of being governed by public schoolboys.

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IRONICALLY, that’s pretty much the Scottish electorate, where even middle-class professionals accept that an unfettered market creates only an illusion of personal advancement and a cruel reality of division and misery.

Sadly for Labour, though, that electorate’s already spoken for. Nicola Sturgeon pitched her progressive ideas perfectly on Tuesday night’s ITV programme (despite her exclusion from the debate), partly because she excels on TV but mostly because she’s pitching to Scots. We are the right electorate for her kind of politics. And vice versa.

So, if Corbyn is defeated, as the polls predict, more than his time as opposition leader will come to an end.

When Gordon Brown was defeated in 2015, many Scottish Labour supporters grimly concluded that Labour should never again try to beat the Tories at their own managerial game. But maybe with the right leader …

Well that man has come and looks set to go without denting the Tories’ grip on England.

So, win or lose, Jeremy Corbyn represents the end of the Union. If he wins, Labour will almost certainly be dependent on SNP votes to hold power for a full five-year term. The cost of that support is simple – a second independence referendum in the autumn of 2021 at the very latest.

If he loses – far more likely – progressive Unionists in Scotland will have to face an inescapable truth. The Scots electorate seems equipped and prepared to build a fair society. The English electorate does not.