In perhaps his most important speech as prime minister yet, Sir Keir Starmer today said the National Health Service (NHS) won’t be thrown any more money unless it agrees to reforms.
This pledge is a welcome recognition of the conclusion of a new report, that hospitals are doing less work for their patients despite record levels of funding. Among the findings of Lord Ara Darzi’s investigation, published today, was that emergency departments are in such “an awful state” that thousands of people die each year because they are not seen quickly enough.
Talking in London, Starmer described these avoidable deaths as “chilling”—although just three months ago, in the build-up to the July general election, the same Keir Starmer revealed his fanatical foundations by claiming he would not use private healthcare to help a suffering close relative.
He also attacked previous Conservative governments, which he said “broke the NHS,” and insisted that “we didn’t know the full scale of the damage” until the release of Darzi’s report—even though Labour said before the election that it would not do as Tory administrations had done before it and claim its inheritance was ‘worse than we imagined.’
The prime minister correctly noted that the NHS suffered worse than it might have through COVID due to years of mismanagement. But he failed to take responsibility for his role in pushing for more and more radical restrictions during the pandemic, which contributed to waiting lists reaching deadly highs, and will continue to put a strain on the system for decades to come.
And then to the crux of his speech. Starmer made the questionable claim that he was “elected on a mandate for change,” and laid out a Soviet-esque “10-year plan” made up of three key aims:
- To “use technology to empower patients”—for example, by making patient records “fully digital” and accessible by all hospitals;
- To shift more care “from hospitals to communities,” by making use of local services for tests and scans and utilising distant “digital consultations” and “virtual wards”; and
- To move “from sickness to prevention.” The government’s radical smoking ban proposals form a part of this aim.
He made no mention of mass immigration, which Reform UK has long highlighted as a key cause of burden for the NHS. And suggested—when he ruled out “abandoning those founding ideals of a public service, publicly funded, free at the point of use”—Labour will not incentivise people to use private health care to reduce NHS waiting lists, or look at changing the system’s funding model.
When Reform leader Nigel Farage suggested steps such as these ahead of the election, other party leaders told the public: “He doesn’t believe in the NHS … a national treasure.”
This cultish mindset has often prevented much-needed change to the health service from being implemented. Whether or not Starmer’s agenda is accepted—and whether, if it is, it actually makes enough of a difference—will have important implications for the as yet declining state of the nation’s health.
