It was a Labour government that founded the NHS, in 1948, but if we are not careful, a Labour government will be supervising its demise.

Neither Keir Starmer, nor Wes Streeting, the Shadow Health secretary, has breathed a word of support for the striking nurses and doctors. This puts them in the same camp as the Tories, as on so many other policy matters.

Streeting has said that the NHS needs more reforms, rather than more money.

 

This is utter bullshit. We have had umpteen Health Secretaries over the years, each one leaving a legacy of unnecessary, complex and expensive reforms and lowered real-terms expenditure.

What the NHS needs is not more reform, by which Streeting means more privatisation, but more money.  We need expenditure per head of population brought up at least to the level of the rest of Europe. We need a similar improvement in the number of hospital beds, nurses and doctors.

The long-running disputes between nurses and doctors and the government is as much over staffing levels and patient care as over salaries.

The government’s big lie is that the hospital waiting lists are caused by the pandemic and staff strikes. The government hopes the public are gullible enough to swallow that one.

The truth is that unprecedentedly long waiting list and queues in A&E pre-date the pandemic and the strikes. There are hundreds of thousands of nursing vacancies and a massive brain-drain of doctors flooding overseas, where they get higher pay and lighter work-loads.

Hospitals are forced to spend heavily on temporary agency staff and the pay-back for the criminal PFI (private finance initiative) concocted by Gordon Brown to pay for new and refurbished hospitals .

Our perfidious government has proudly proclaimed that it is recruiting more nurses. It is not recruiting them, it is stealing them. Over 90 per cent  ─yes, over 90 per cent  ─of new nurses are from abroad, mainly from Third World countries that can ill-afford to train and then lose such skilled workers. The government is too skinflint to spend  adequately to attract and train nurses from our indigenous population.

And what does the Labour so-called Opposition have to say about this?

As about most things, sod all.

Come the General Election, I shall be voting neither Tory, nor Labour. The Tories consider themselves to be  the natural party of government and Starmer thinks victory will drop into his lap.

A curse on both their houses.