My best hope is that Wes Streeting is incompetent, because every other option is worse given his hatred of the NHS
I guess I had to talk about Wes Streeting at some time during the course of this damp squib of an election campaign, because it seems that he wants everyone to talk about him.
Streeting had article in the Sunday Times yesterday the purpose of which was very hard to discern, unless it was to:
Abuse the public for believing in the merits of the NHS.
Abuse the staff of the NHS.
To undermine the management of the NHS.
To suggest that those who have committed abuse and cover up in the NHS are typical of the organisation as a whole.
Lay the groundwork for the private management to the NHS, because he clearly does not believe that its existing structure is appropriate.
The first four of those suggestions are very clear from the article, a copy of which can be found here (you will have to download it to read it, I expect).
The last of my suggestions is not stated. I read it between the lines of the bullying and abuse that Streeting has to offer to everyone. In doing so, I may be charitable in believing that he has got a big idea, even if he has not stated it. It may, of course, be that he has absolutely no idea what he is going to do at all, apart from bullying and abusing people, which is exactly what he is accusing others of doing.
I can, however, be clear about three things . The first is that he did not mention the continual under funding of the NHS by the Tories compared to the requirement for cash to meet the medical rate of inflation. He does, therefore, exonerate theories from all the apparent guilt for the state of the NHS, which is, apparently, entirely the fault of its staff.
Second, I think we can be sure he is not offering adequate new funding as a result.
Third, he does in the absence of an explicit big idea offer an extremely small idea instead, which is that he will bully and harass NHS staff into working longer hours at the weekend when they are already deeply fatigued by the demands made upon them to the extent that they are leading the service in droves, with the intention of providing an additional 2 million outpatient appointments in the NHS year, which is what his promised 40,000 extra appointments a week represent.
To put this number in context, in 2022/23, which is the last full year for which we have data present, there 124 million outpatient appointments in the NHS, although only 95.9 outpatients actually attended, with about 8 million of the difference being explained by those who did not arrive for their appointments. I have not had time to work out the remaining reconciling item, and nor does it greatly matter because what is obvious is that the offer that Streeting is making is fairly insignificant when there are, supposedly, 7 million people on waiting lists . The additional number he proposes is also within the normal rate of routine variation in appointments offered is, such as the poverty of his ambition, which does, nonetheless, become one of the so-called headline Labour pledges.
Why make this point when superficially it would seem that all it does is confirm that Streeting is, as NHS commentator Roy Lilley calls him, a silly man without any plausible plan but with a massive contempt for the organisation that he wishes to control? I can only conclude that privatisation of the NHS is his sole real agenda because, based upon what he says in the article he wrote, including his stated desire that we end our belief in the NHS as having virtue in its own right, nothing else but a plan for that makes any sense at all.
Unless that is, Streeting is considerably more incompetent than even I have imagined, which I think is possible. In fact, that is my best hope, because every other alternative is worse.
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