Only the po-faced miserabilists of the Labour Party could fail to see their NHS consultation would swiftly descend into parody
You’ve got to hand it to the British public, we know how to find light in the darkness. Here we are, forking out £165 billion a year for a healthcare “service” so dismal we’re terrified of ever getting ill, and still we manage to look on the bright side.
Within hours of Labour proudly launching the “biggest” consultation on the NHS since its inception, asking the public to put forward their own ideas for reform, the site was deluged with ideas ranging from a “maximum BMI for nurses” to free cinema seats for patients as they wait to be seen.
How the Government’s band of po-faced miserabilists will have greeted these responses is anyone’s guess, but mine would be that it has gone down about as well as the joke about Starmer being the son of a “toolmaker”. Britain, a nation which once prided itself on its caustic, self-deprecating humour, is now governed by a man who has no favourite book, no dreams (and presumably no imagination), no sense of whether he is an optimist, pessimist, extrovert or introvert (“I’ve never really thought about it,” he said in an interview earlier this year).
This matters, because it’ll take vision – and the conviction to see it realised – to fix our bloated, socialist healthcare system. Too many members of the public still buy into the lie that it is the envy of the world. Yes, public dissatisfaction is at an all-time high, with less than a quarter of people satisfied with our health system, but in surveys of what makes us “proud” to be British, it still comes top.
The empirical evidence alone should disavow us of this ridiculous notion. UK cancer survival rates are lagging 15 years behind other major countries. When the King’s Fund compared the NHS against a group of wealthy nations, we were found to be the worst at saving stroke victims and second worst at saving heart attack sufferers. Then there are the near-daily reports of failure; the ambulances told to leave patients in hospital corridors to cut waiting times, the 250 people who may be dying needlessly in A&E every week.
By no sane metric is the NHS the world’s best healthcare service, but still, it’ll take a brave leader to set Britain on a path towards a social insurance model. Failing that, there are probably only two levers any politician can pull if they want to be seen to be doing something. Either they forget about reforming the NHS, and instead try to reform the British public with more bossy pettifogging interventionism that constricts personal freedom. Or they pour more good money after bad in the vain hope that, by doing the same thing over and over again, they might get different results.
The die appears to have already been cast. Starmer has just declared nanny state measures are “necessary” to protect public health. The Prime Minister is basing this on the non-sequitur that, because some parents are failing to clean their children’s teeth, we need a ban on smoking in pub gardens and “junk food” advertising. Labour appears to believe a focus on “prevention” in health will save the state money, but economists have understood for decades that the nonsmoking population is more costly than the smoking population – because smokers die earlier. The “evidence” that advertising bans will reduce childhood obesity is mostly just creative writing.
Starmer’s “prevention revolution” is a nanny statist’s dream, a golden opportunity for all those who believe they know how best others can live their lives. Maybe we are too fat, too unhealthy, too sedentary. Maybe we drink, eat, smoke, vape more than we should. But that’s the human condition. Most people don’t want risk-free lives, they don’t itch for public health nannies to release them from the prison of temptation. What they do want is a healthcare service which can efficiently treat them when they’re ill.
Then there’s the billions Rachel Reeves is expected to punt at the NHS in her maiden Budget next week. This, we’re told, is necessary because parts of the healthcare service are “literally falling apart”. How is that possible, when the state is spending more than ever as a proportion of GDP on the system? The more we put in, the narrower the marginal gains: the recent Darzi report, for instance, found that, while hospital staff numbers are up by 17 per cent since 2019, hospital productivity is 11.4 per cent lower.
Until the government, any government, is willing to confront the dysfunction at the core of Britain’s healthcare service, the permanent crisis will continue. Suddenly, installing a Wetherspoons in every hospital to reduce rates of mental illness doesn’t seem such a bad idea after all.
Only the po-faced miserabilists of the Labour Party could fail to see their NHS consultation would swiftly descend into parody
You’ve got to hand it to the British public, we know how to find light in the darkness. Here we are, forking out £165 billion a year for a healthcare “service” so dismal we’re terrified of ever getting ill, and still we manage to look on the bright side.
Within hours of Labour proudly launching the “biggest” consultation on the NHS since its inception, asking the public to put forward their own ideas for reform, the site was deluged with ideas ranging from a “maximum BMI for nurses” to free cinema seats for patients as they wait to be seen.
How the Government’s band of po-faced miserabilists will have greeted these responses is anyone’s guess, but mine would be that it has gone down about as well as the joke about Starmer being the son of a “toolmaker”. Britain, a nation which once prided itself on its caustic, self-deprecating humour, is now governed by a man who has no favourite book, no dreams (and presumably no imagination), no sense of whether he is an optimist, pessimist, extrovert or introvert (“I’ve never really thought about it,” he said in an interview earlier this year).
This matters, because it’ll take vision – and the conviction to see it realised – to fix our bloated, socialist healthcare system. Too many members of the public still buy into the lie that it is the envy of the world. Yes, public dissatisfaction is at an all-time high, with less than a quarter of people satisfied with our health system, but in surveys of what makes us “proud” to be British, it still comes top.
The empirical evidence alone should disavow us of this ridiculous notion. UK cancer survival rates are lagging 15 years behind other major countries. When the King’s Fund compared the NHS against a group of wealthy nations, we were found to be the worst at saving stroke victims and second worst at saving heart attack sufferers. Then there are the near-daily reports of failure; the ambulances told to leave patients in hospital corridors to cut waiting times, the 250 people who may be dying needlessly in A&E every week.
By no sane metric is the NHS the world’s best healthcare service, but still, it’ll take a brave leader to set Britain on a path towards a social insurance model. Failing that, there are probably only two levers any politician can pull if they want to be seen to be doing something. Either they forget about reforming the NHS, and instead try to reform the British public with more bossy pettifogging interventionism that constricts personal freedom. Or they pour more good money after bad in the vain hope that, by doing the same thing over and over again, they might get different results.
The die appears to have already been cast. Starmer has just declared nanny state measures are “necessary” to protect public health. The Prime Minister is basing this on the non-sequitur that, because some parents are failing to clean their children’s teeth, we need a ban on smoking in pub gardens and “junk food” advertising. Labour appears to believe a focus on “prevention” in health will save the state money, but economists have understood for decades that the nonsmoking population is more costly than the smoking population – because smokers die earlier. The “evidence” that advertising bans will reduce childhood obesity is mostly just creative writing.
Starmer’s “prevention revolution” is a nanny statist’s dream, a golden opportunity for all those who believe they know how best others can live their lives. Maybe we are too fat, too unhealthy, too sedentary. Maybe we drink, eat, smoke, vape more than we should. But that’s the human condition. Most people don’t want risk-free lives, they don’t itch for public health nannies to release them from the prison of temptation. What they do want is a healthcare service which can efficiently treat them when they’re ill.
Then there’s the billions Rachel Reeves is expected to punt at the NHS in her maiden Budget next week. This, we’re told, is necessary because parts of the healthcare service are “literally falling apart”. How is that possible, when the state is spending more than ever as a proportion of GDP on the system? The more we put in, the narrower the marginal gains: the recent Darzi report, for instance, found that, while hospital staff numbers are up by 17 per cent since 2019, hospital productivity is 11.4 per cent lower.
Until the government, any government, is willing to confront the dysfunction at the core of Britain’s healthcare service, the permanent crisis will continue. Suddenly, installing a Wetherspoons in every hospital to reduce rates of mental illness doesn’t seem such a bad idea after all.