Labour’s infantile scaremongering

Is the NHS safe in Boris Johnson’s hands, Jeremy Corbyn asked yesterday. He said Labour has evidence that the Conservatives have put the health service “up for sale” as part of a post-brexit trade deal with America. This was in the form of a 451-page leaked document which sets out the parameters for a possible agreement and includes talks about access to British markets for US drugs companies.

Since the Tories have said the NHS is their top domestic policy priority and will not be on the table in any future trade talks, it is hard for them to prove otherwise beyond saying so. Moreover, the documents flourished by the Labour leader at his press conference do not actually show what he claimed.

For Mr Corbyn there is a political premium to be had simply by alarming enough voters about the threat to the NHS whether the allegations are true or not. It also serves to distract from his own difficulties over anti-semitism and Brexit.

We have been here at almost every general election since the NHS was founded in 1948. Treated like a sacred institution whose inherent rectitude can never be questioned whatever its shortcomings, it remains impervious to the reforms that would preserve its universality while making it work better.

The infantile games played by Mr Corbyn and almost every Labour leader for the past 40 years in order to “weaponise” the NHS, as Ed Miliband put it in 2015, prevent politicians from making improvements for the benefit of the taxpayers who fund it and want it to work properly.

The Conservatives have shied away from reform for fear of being accused of privatising the NHS not just by Labour but by the great army of NHS employees who are wary of change even though they know its top-heavy structures and inflexible systems are inimical to delivering the top quality health care that could be available to all.

Rightly or wrongly, the Conservatives are not only wedded to the NHS pretty much as it is established but their spending promises are only marginally less generous than their opponent’s. An analysis by the Institute for Fiscal Studies says that under Labour, the NHS would receive 2.3 per cent more funding by 2023 than the Tories have planned for. The NHS budget will have risen by £40 billion in the 10 years of Conservative-led government, hardly the actions of a party intent on running it down.