Why is it that so many right-wing labour politicians were President of the National Union of students? The roll of dishonour is considerable: Jack straw, Trevor Phillips, Jim  Murphy, Charles Clarke, Wes Streeting. They get there thanks to the domination of Labour students within the NUS. As NUS President they serve their apprenticeship and then, provided they are sufficiently right-wing, a seat in the Commons awaits.

Streeting is currently Shadow Health Secretary.

Did he demonstrate his solidarity with striking NHS nurses or doctors by showing up on their picket lines?  Not bloody likely. He would be more likely to express backing for the Tory government’s resistance  to any pay rises.

If he becomes health Secretary in a Starmer government, gawd help the NHS. He is of the tradition of the last umpteen health Ministers, taking the view that the NHS does not need more money; it needs reform. He would oversee yet more valueless tinkering and yet more privatisation.

He promises to get rid of the waiting lists, not by employing more doctors and nurses and opening up more beds. No, that would cost money and Labour is committed to spending no more than the Tories on anything. (so, what’s the difference between Labour and Tory? You may ask. Not enough difference to  persuade me to help Starmer and his crew of right-wing yes-men into office, is my answer.)

Wes’s wondrous plan for getting more patients speedily through the system is to farm out patients  to the private sector, paid for by  the NHS. He seems to think that the private hospitals have spare doctors and nurses hanging on the wall awaiting the call from the NHS.

There is no such spare capacity. Empty beds and unused staff would cost money and the private sector’s shareholders (mainly in the USA) want dividends, not spare capacity.

That spare capacity is a figment of wee Wes’s imagination.

When a private hospital gets a call to undertake some hip replacements for the NHS, it brings in the required surgeons and nurses. And where do these expert staff come from? From the NHS, recruited by an agency and paid higher salaries than the NHS.

Instead of doing extra hours for the NHS, staff earn more money lending themselves to agencies. Thus the NHS pays billions each year, buying back their own staff, who are thus not directly available  for NHS work and so the waiting lists become longer.

It’s a mad, mad world my friend, but it is not mad in the eyes of Streeting and his Labour front bench cronies.

 

 

Get your head around this, Wesley: the NHS needs  no more reform and no more privatisation; it needs more money.

It needs sufficient extra funds to bring us up to European levels in respect of numbers of beds, nurses, midwives and doctors per head of population.