Free waffles for patients with every meal. A Wetherspoons pub in every hospital. To deter malingerers, video displays on every ward of Theresa May dancing. These are just a few of the amusing ideas to emerge as part of the Government’s consultation exercise on how to reform the NHS.
Derisive scepticism is exactly what this time-wasting, energy-sapping initiative deserves. Launched with a noisy fanfare on Monday by the Health Secretary Wes Streeting, the so-called “national conversation” about healthcare is really a vehicle for procrastination. The aim is to give the illusion of progress while ducking the urgent challenge of achieving real change. Streeting, who often describes the NHS as “broken”, would probably like a historic parallel to be drawn with the “Great Debate” on education, opened by the moderate Labour Prime Minister Jim Callaghan with a contentious speech at Oxford in October 1976.
But there was a burning sense of purpose behind Callaghan’s move. He was deeply concerned about a series of fundamental, specific problems with the education system, including the absence of a national curriculum, the malignant influence of progressive teaching methods, the weakness of the inspection regime, and the large number of pupils who left school without basic skills.
His “Great Debate” signalled the beginning of a lengthy process of transformation in the quality of British schooling over the coming decades.
But there is little evidence of such focus or ambition behind Streeting’s approach. An air of defensive vagueness has hung over his first months in office, culminating in his pathetic appeal this week for the public to provide him with some policies.
It’s amazing that, after 14 years in opposition, Labour should have been so ill-prepared for responsibility. As a Shadow Cabinet Minister, Streeting often talked a good game about his determination to be radical, but his veneer of boldness concealed his impulse for delay and the hollowness of his plans. The supposed agent of reform turns out to be the architect of retreat. The country does not need a lengthy consultation about the NHS or a waffly 10-year strategy full of distant promises and meaningless platitudes.
Beyond the jokes, it’s clear the nation wants a service that delivers, without the grotesque waiting lists or barriers to seeing a doctor. Practical action is required now, rather than yet more words about a Utopian future.
Simply pouring more cash into this monolithic, inflexible structure is no solution. Left-wingers still cling to the argument that underfunding is to blame but this is a myth. Britain spends proportionately more taxpayers’ money on healthcare than many other developed countries yet has worse outcomes. Similarly, the number of staff in the NHS has gone up by more than a quarter of million since 2015, but productivity has actually fallen.
This is due to poor management, over-centralisation, outdated technology, fractious industrial relations, and excessive bureaucracy. The truth is that the 1948 model on which the NHS was founded by Clement Attlee’s post-war Labour government is no longer working.
Even in the late 1940s it struggled to meet demand. Within just 18 months of its creation, it needed an emergency cash injection of £100million, the equivalent of a quarter of its entire budget.
What the NHS requires is a major change in its culture. In practice, that will mean more private sector involvement, wider use of insurance, the extension of charges, and greater flexibility in the workforce. Narrow sectional interests, particularly those of the reactionary, greedy British Medical Association, will have to be overcome.
Whether Labour has the guts for this fight is doubtful.
Streeting’s prevarications, combined with the swift surrender to the junior doctors in the award of a massive 20% pay rise without conditions, seem to indicate that quasi-religious sentimentality about the NHS still prevails in the party. For the keepers of the holy flame of socialist healthcare, nothing has changed. Public consultation is mere performative politics to distract us from their failure.
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The decline in the importance of the Commonwealth Games has been highlighted in the drastically slimmed down programme for 2026 in Glasgow, which only agreed to host the event after two Australian states, Queensland and Victoria, pulled out because of escalating costs.
It’s all a far cry from the 1950s., when the Games were regarded as a major global competition. Indeed, 70 years ago Vancouver in Canada witnessed one of the greatest races in athletics history, when the British medical student Roger Bannister, fresh from breaking the four-minute mile barrier, took on the brilliant Australian John Landy, who had also just run the same distance in under four minutes.
With an astonishing, lung-bursting spurt in the home strait, Bannister emerged the victor. Subsequently, he always said that his dramatic triumph over Landy was the highlight of his career. Their epic encounter, known as the Miracle Mile, captured the attention of the world in a way that would be unthinkable for any Commonwealth race today.
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As a child, I found Paddington Bear a bit of a bore. Nor was I entranced by his unorthodox storage arrangements for his marmalade sandwiches. But my negative feelings have deepened since he became a propaganda tool for the pro-immigration brigade, who use sentimentality about his Peruvian refugee status to promote their open door policy.
Now the Home Office has joined in this emotional manipulation by issuing the cartoon bear with an official passport, following a request for one from the producers of the latest Paddington movie. His appearance at a pro-Palestinian demonstration cannot be far away.
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Another diplomatic shambles made in Downing Street, as Donald Trump’s campaign team complains about Labour’s dispatch of volunteers across the Atlantic to support the Democrats’ bid for the White House.
Even some of Sir Starmer’s most senior aides have been dragged into the row, which threatens to sour the special relationship between Britain and the US if Trump regains the Presidency. I sensed that this was going to blow up into a major controversy when I heard the notorious Labour spinner Alastair Campbell airily dismiss the story as an irrelevance.
There is a man who knows all about the folly of cack-handed interference in other countries. Indeed the hypocrisy of both Labour and the Democrats is spectacular. For years, they have screeched about the dangers of foreign involvement in elections, only to be guilty of precisely this practice themselves.
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Next month sees the 50th anniversary of the opening of McDonald’s first restaurant, at Woolwich in south London. Today the chain has 1,270 outlets here and employs 120,000 people. This phenomenal success is a kitchen nightmare among the finger-wagging prigs and puritans of the public health lobby, for whom the Big Mag is the ultimate symbol of calorific indulgence. But for fast food connoisseurs like myself, McDonald’s arrival 50 years ago added an irresistible new dimension to the Great British Menu.
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When the great reforming Home Secretary Sir Robert Peel created the Metropolitan Police in 1829 he stressed the need for “absolutely impartial service to the law”.
Yet, in our increasingly fractured society, that ethos is crumbling. Judicial authorities are swayed by politics. The concept of policing by consent is turning into a veto by troublemakers. Nothing better illustrates this disturbing change than the contrast between the failure to prosecute the thugs who recently assaulted police officers at Manchester Airport and the farcical decision to charge firearms officer Martyn Blake over the fatal shooting of South London gangster Chris Kaba.
That kind of two-tier justice will sound the death knell for faith in the law.