Change, promised Labour’s election manifesto, was coming and the man put up regularly as the agent of the biggest change of all was shadow health secretary Wes Streeting, pictured.
The NHS will be so much better under Labour, they told us. We’ll cut waiting times with 40,000 more appointments every week, they said, we’ll double the number of cancer scanners, and recruit 8500 more mental health staff. All fully costed, they claimed, so surely they knew what they intended to do?
Although I’m now the shadow transport secretary, and health is devolved to the Scottish Parliament, with my previous experience in healthcare I keep a close eye on the sector, and anyone who read Labour’s manifesto would be in no doubt they had a plan.
Here are a few examples: Labour’s reforms will shift our NHS away from a model geared towards late diagnosis… Labour’s life sciences plan will develop an NHS innovation and adoption strategy… Labour will transform the NHS app… GPs are the front door to the health service, so Labour will reform the system.
But it didn’t say there would be a public consultation first, that nothing would happen until April at the earliest, ten months after the election, and any changes would take a decade to implement.
It would be unwise to impose a plan on the service, said Labour’s cheerleaders this week, but a consultation without a proposition is just a big, directionless conversation. For quite a few it’s already been an opportunity for course humour, like suggesting BMI limits for nurses.
For all the pre-election rhetoric, and repeated mention of “plans” in the manifesto, it turns out there were no plans at all, just soundbites.
They have had 15 years to think about this and the only part of the manifesto they’ve honoured is to hand out massive pay increases, yet the 22 per cent awarded to junior doctors has done little to quell their militancy.
But perhaps I should cut Labour some slack, because at the very least they acknowledge a plan is needed. The same cannot be said of the SNP-run Scottish Government, where health minister Neil Gray seems in denial about the problems facing NHS Scotland, more bothered about avoiding talk of reform in case it upsets the health unions.
The only plan for change is the discredited National Care Service which will waste badly needed millions on internal bureaucratic upheaval and make no impact on health outcomes.
In fact, we know more about what the SNP Scottish Government won’t do, like not replace Edinburgh’s world-renowned Princess Alexandra Eye Pavilion, not establish the new treatment centre at the Royal Infirmary and not continue with investment in a new world class cancer centre at the Western General.
If, as seems likely, there is some extra money for the NHS in chancellor Rachel Reeves’ budget next week, it could mean more money for the service in Scotland, but the SNP would need to guarantee that’s where the money would be spent. And even then, it would probably go on wage settlements with no productivity conditions and no meaningful improvement for patient care.
Rather than hitting the ground running, as they promised to do, Labour have just hit the ground. The SNP, however, is buried beneath it, praying for a miracle cure.
