Transformative Moderation Within the Bounds of the Hypothetical

Whatever its troubles on the electability front, Team Starmer remains determined to push through its agenda for change; hence the announcement by Wideboy Wesley Streeting that years of below-inflation pay rises for NHS personnel are to be moderately and sensibly transmogrified with a below-inflation pay rise for NHS personnel. Since so many frontline NHS workers are immigrants, the imposition of another de facto cut will win over yet more Farage Falange voters with legitimate and understandable concerns about costs to the taxpayer; while the Labour membership's vision of Wideboy Wesley as a prince in waiting will be healthily tarnished by association with an unpopular parsimony. Displaying their usual skewed sense of priority, the unions have shown little appreciation for these subtleties, even though the pay rise is below the rate of inflation only from the limited and doubtless borderline-antisemitic viewpoint of current reality. When considered alongside a rate of inflation that is purely anticipatory and unencumbered by vulgar actuality, the Streeting largesse in fact stands quivering on the verge of the noticeable. Let's hope he hasn't gone too far.