Party conferences are less about conferring than about speeches and announcements. Today Keir Starmer revealed NHS Online, a virtual hospital of vast scope and wonderful promise. Patients will be able to swiftly connect to clinicians at a time and place to suit them. NHS Online, said Starmer, demonstrates that Labour favours ‘renewal’, while Reform only pursues the ‘politics of grievance’.

Grievance is a miserable trade. Presumably it wasn’t grievance that led Starmer to call Reform’s policies racist and their supporters – if not racist themselves – too stupid to understand what they were backing. Insulting Reform voters is always likely to land well at the Labour party conference, although it’s not an obvious route to winning those voters back. But making the NHS better should be safer g

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