The 2015 general election isn’t a referendum about what exactly someone eating a bacon butty looks like. It’s a referendum on the NHS.
The Tories think the general public is utterly stupid. They think that if they subject Wales to an intense smear campaign about the NHS discussing the English NHS will be ‘out of bounds’.
The Tories must think English voters were all born yesterday. They think nobody will care about the £2.4 billion disastrous reforms which propelled competition law and costly admin into the NHS. They think nobody will care about these reforms which nobody voted for.
If the Health and Social Care Act (2012) was the solution, what was the exact problem? It can’t have been patient safety, even though Jeremy Hunt has repeatedly referred to Mid Staffs since becoming the Secretary of State for Health. Cheap political point scoring has been vulgar under this Government. Labour never cited Harold Shipman’s style as a Doctor as a failure of a Conservative administration.
It’s perfectly correct that Labour should ask about what has happened under the lifetime of this Government in units such as Colchester. There the “major incident” is not an outbreak of Ebola, but an outbreak of dangerous staffing. What is not reasonable to do is to engulf the hardworking nurses and Doctors in a culture of blame and shame, vilifying them for not having been given the tools to do the job.
The Health and Social Care Act (2012) cannot have been the solution if patient safety was the solution, as there is only one clause in this Act regarding patient safety. And that clause was in fact to abolish the National Patient Safety Agency. The real petrol in the tank of this Act is the mechanism which puts contracts out to competitive tendering, meaning that NHS services had a way of being aggressively pimped to the private sector.
It’s simply utterly fraudulent to say that this is how it’s always been under Labour. For a start, Justice Silber in the Lewisham judgment gave clear reasons how the law had changed under this Government, and why Jeremy Hunt’s decision was unlawful in the High Court. It was not only unlawful in the High Court, but it was also unlawful in the Court of Appeal. And was that a good use of hardworking taxpayers’ money? To pay Hunt’s lawyers for this dead-duck case, money was used which could have been used to give a pay rise to the majority of nurses, a pay rise which they were denied yet again.
Furthermore, this Government at shotgun notice legislated for a torpedo hospital closure clause, with the Liberal Democrats on the accelerator pedal. None of us are Luddites, but it’s utterly vulgar to present cuts under the cover of reconfigurations.
Things have fundamentally changed, in that people are now genuinely scared about the direction of travel. The National Health Service should be run for people, not profit. It should offer integrated health and care, not competitive tendering. Before the last election, the NHS was not an issue. Now people are taking to the streets over hospital closures and GP surgery closures. The record all-time high in satisfaction before the last election has now disappeared following the top down reorganisation which nobody voted for.
A&E waits have been disastrous. The length of time it takes to see your GP for a ‘routine appointment’ has become a joke in some parts of the country. And yet the current Government seem utterly divorced from reality – while Rome burns, Jeremy Hunt is fiddling away another sham policy in the guise of a 24/7 NHS.
What is clear is that Lynton Crosby wants to make the general election of May 7th 2015 a referendum on Ed Miliband eating a bacon butty.
It’s not that. It’s a referendum on the state of the NHS.
