Editorial: The Tories have wrecked the NHS – but that doesn’t mean Labour will rescue it

THE defection of Conservative MP Dan Poulter to Labour in a Suffolk seat that has been Tory since its creation is another blow to a party in serious trouble.

Over 60 Tory MPs plan to stand down when an election comes, reflecting the generalised fear of a wipeout. Poulter too plans to stand down, but his decision to cross the floor ahead of this in a protest at the destruction of the NHS is still damaging.

He rightly states that the NHS is “unrecognisable” compared to 2010. The cure he recommends is a Labour government, which he endorses on two grounds: that Labour has a track record of improving the NHS, and that the party has abandoned the socialist politics of the Jeremy Corbyn years.

Poulter’s hostility to Corbyn-era Labour is uninteresting. As left Labour campaign group Momentum points out, he is a right-wing politician who for 14 years has supported vicious spending cuts and privatisations like that at Royal Mail (not to mention privatising health legislation like Andrew Lansley’s Health & Social Care Act). We should be more worried at his endorsement of today’s Labour Party than his rejection of yesterday’s.

But on the NHS, his comments will resonate. The depth of the Tory Party crisis is rooted in people’s real perception that life in Britain is getting dramatically worse. 

That applies to the cost of living, which has left wages far behind, but also to services which are palpably worse than they used to be: whether because they are spewing sewage into our rivers like the water companies, unable to deliver the post on time like Royal Mail or failing to provide prompt and efficient treatment for health problems like the NHS.

The NHS overtook the economy as voters’ biggest concern in February, according to polling by Ipsos. Small wonder when waiting lists have hit 7.5 million: there can hardly be a person in the country who doesn’t have a friend or relative who has been affected.

And the Conservatives bear a heavy responsibility. 

In the decade up to the pandemic, real-terms healthcare spending per head rose on average by just 0.4 per cent a year — in four years it actually fell, despite rising pressures on the service. 

That compares very poorly to the record of the last Labour government, which raised spending by 5.7 per cent a year on average from 1997-2010. It even compares badly to that of the Thatcher and Major Conservative governments, which averaged a 2.1 per cent annual increase.

But we should be more cautious than Poulter about endorsing Keir Starmer’s solution.

Starmer and shadow health secretary Wes Streeting have pointedly refused to offer the increases in NHS budgets that the Tony Blair and Gordon Brown governments delivered. Streeting is emphatic that he will not “pour money into a 20th-century model,” instead demanding reforms which, in increasing reliance on the private sector, both mimic existing Conservative policy and are unlikely to make a difference to waiting lists (because private healthcare in Britain recruits from the NHS, so overall capacity will not grow).

And the crisis in the NHS is also a case of chickens coming home to roost.

Britain’s public services are collapsing under the strain of decades of neoliberal policy. In the NHS, hospitals have been undermined through outsourcing services to the private sector as well as by the cost of PFI debt — both issues with their origins in the Blair years.

To restore our NHS to health, we need a reversal of privatisation and outsourcing and a forced end to all PFI contracts, as well as a significant increase in overall funding to bring us closer to healthcare spending levels in France or Germany.

Labour isn’t offering any of that. And that needs to change before it can pose as a saviour of our health service.