Labour’s election campaign rides on shameful NHS scaremongering
Labour’s campaign will be wildly populist, gambling on the theory that voters are ready for a radical alternative.
To make their case, promises of free education, free social care, higher pay, lower rent and better services will be offered alongside a dystopian vision of Tory Britain under Boris Johnson.
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Nowhere will this be more bluntly articulated than on the issue of the NHS. Shadow chancellor John McDonnell was hammering the point in broadcast studios yesterday, claiming Johnson will carve up the NHS in a dodgy deal with US President Donald Trump.
Warming to his theme, McDonnell also vowed to erase all traces of privatisation from within the health service. Such an intellectually defunct and woefully misleading statement should be shot out of the sky the moment it rears its head, but this is an election campaign — and if you doubt the effectiveness of exaggerated claims about the NHS, just cast your mind back to Vote Leave’s £350m figure splashed on a red bus.
According to the King’s Fund, NHS commissioners spent about seven per cent (around £9bn) of their budgets on private or independent providers in 2017/18 and 2018/19, and despite Labour’s rhetoric about “creeping privatisation” the King’s Fund is clear that “there is no evidence of a significant increase in the share of spending on private providers or widespread privatisation of NHS services — even if a very broad definition of private care spending is used”.
The NHS has worked with (and relied on) private providers for decades in areas such as dentistry, opticians’ services, pathology, radiology and pharmacy services — not to mention building management and estate services.
Is McDonnell vowing to bring all this back under state control?
Last year, the independent healthcare sector provided 500,000 elective surgical procedures for the NHS.
Would Labour ban the health service from using such services from private providers?
The government’s own measure of patient satisfaction shows 99 per cent of NHS patients treated by a private provider would be extremely likely or likely to recommend the service they received compared with a national average of around 96 per cent for NHS hospitals.
Simply put, people don’t give a hoot who provides the care — as long as it remains free at the point of use.
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Labour’s bloody-minded dogma would poison healthcare in this country but McDonnell believes, probably with some justification, that there is a political prize to be won from whipping up fear around privatisation.
This is shameful, and he has shown himself to be shameless.
Image credit: Getty