The crisis in the National Health Service has attracted negative headlines for the Conservative Party this winter with even traditionally Tory supporting press criticising the government. But as Labour has begun laying out its own plans for the NHS, these have proved equally controversial.
In an interview with The Times, the shadow health secretary Wes Streeting said he wanted to phase out GP practices and allow people to self-refer for some specialist services – a move that the paper said has “infuriated some Labour MPs” but that Streeting believes would help alleviate some of the pressures facing the health service.
He has also previously announced that Labour would use private healthcare to clear the NHS backlog – currently standing at 7.2 million patients on waiting lists – and he recently unveiled a plan to completely ban cigarettes and impose further restrictions on vaping.
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What did the papers say?
Streeting “clearly has no intention of tinkering around the edges,” said Rachel Wearmouth in The New Statesman.
Yet while Starmer has pledged “national renewal” on the NHS, he has also insisted that he won’t get out the “big government chequebook”, meaning Labour “won’t go into the next election promising more cash for a health service, which many will feel has failed them, unless it is teamed with reform,” Wearmouth added.
The crisis is great enough that even the usually Tory-friendly press has called for more to be done. The Daily Mail called on ministers to end the “deadly NHS crisis”, while The Sun described hospitals as resembling a “war zone”, and The Telegraph claimed the health service was now “imploding”.
Even so, Streeting’s plans have proved controversial too, with questions being asked of his party’s leader Keir Starmer about whether the new proposals are at odds with his own 2020 leadership pledge to “end outsourcing in our NHS”.
Back then, Labour’s position was that “public services should be in public hands, not making profits for shareholders”. Defending his willingness to use private doctors to clear waiting lists, he told Sophy Ridge on Sunday: “We’ve got to acknowledge the health service is not just on its knees – it’s on its face.”
He added: “As we sit here today, there are 7.2 million people on the waiting list. Speak to anyone who works in the NHS and they'll tell you just how stressed it is. My wife works in the NHS. So I know this first hand.”
Of Labour’s intention to create “a route for self-referral” to specialists rather than seeing all patients going through GPs and potentially using local pharmacies more to look at prescriptions, Starmer insisted: “We're not talking about privatising the NHS, we’re talking about using the private sector effectively.”
If a refusal to “open up the spending chequebook” going into the election of 2024 “all seems reminiscent of the Tony Blair and Gordon Brown approach ahead of the 1997 election, it’s because it is,” said Sky News’s political editor Beth Rigby.
“Back then the duo promised to stick to the Tories’ spending envelope for the first two years of Labour government in order to get voters to trust them on the economy,” Rigby said, “and these days it seems that all the radicalism of the Corbyn era has been eradicated as Keir sticks to the centre ground, refusing anything as bold as spending or tax pledges in order not to upset the apple cart.”
What next?
Streeting’s plans have led to a “row” within the Labour party, The Telegraph said, and were labelled nothing short of a “declaration of war” on the NHS by Sam Tarry, the MP who was sacked as a frontbench spokesman after giving a TV interview on an RMT picket line.
The shadow health secretary “also faced a backlash from the British Medical Association”, the paper said, with Emma Runswick, the deputy chairman of its council, calling Streeting’s policies “incredibly disappointing”.
The positions Labour is taking are sure to be controversial among some Labour supporters, said Sky News’s Beth Rigby, and “those on the left who supported [Starmer] when he ran for leadership, may well feel let down.”
True, agreed The New Statesman’s Rachel Wearmouth, but while “Labour may need to tread carefully” to ensure its NHS plans don’t become “a danger for its politicians”, being willing to even take bold steps like “throwing out a big idea early shows the party is growing in confidence and willing to take risks”.
