For all the crowd noise and heavy-breathing match analysis, British democracy is a simple sport. We elect politicians to serve our interests. They direct the vital services that look after our families and communities, such as our healthcare and our schools. The entire political system rests on one basic premise: they work for us.

Believe that, as I do, and this week is one of vast democratic failure. Rather than working for us, Keir Starmer and his ministers are acting against us. They have rammed through parliament a sweeping law that will, independent experts agree, harm the public; and they have done so without even coming clean on the costs or the consequences. What’s worse, MPs and the press have failed to put this under scrutiny.

One way this has happened is through the use of eye-glazing jargon, to make everything look as dry as possible. So where I can, I shall try to avoid acronyms and technicalities.

In December, Starmer and Donald Trump struck a deal on medicine. Downing Street agreed it would spend more on branded drugs, in return for the White House not jacking up tariffs on British pharmaceutical exports to the US. As I wrote at the time, the treaty stank. One of the greatest achievements of British democracy, our NHS, set up to save lives, had been used to save face with Trump. The most rapacious president in American history now had his hands on our healthcare system.

Wes Streeting and his Department of Health and Social Care gave almost no detail about how much this would cost, or what that meant for patients. They created a black hole of........

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