Leo McKinstry
moans about underfunding are exaggerated. NHS spending is due to rise by 35 per cent in cash terms between 2009/10 and 2020/21 with a real increase of around £5billion in the course of this Parliament. Contrary to all the propaganda, the health service now employs more doctors, nurses and technicians than ever before.
Wallowing in their tales of pity the broadcasters cynically avoided the two other big factors that have fuelled the NHS’s difficulties. One is the impact of mass immigration and the other is the anachronistic structure of the health service.
Both these issues were wilfully ignored because they do not suit the fashionable progressive agenda of the metropolitan media, yet they play a far bigger part than the so-called “obesity timebomb”.
It is absurd to pretend that demand has not been increased by the colossal influx of migrants, running officially at 650,000 arrivals a year. Even that figure is a severe underestimate since 825,000 NI numbers were handed to foreigners last year, 629,000 of them to EU citizens, all of whom are now entitled to NHS treatment. Ah, says the politically correct brigade... the NHS could not function without overseas staff. But that is illogical for the burden of migrant patients far outweighs the contribution of migrant professionals.
The other argument used by pro-immigration ideologues is that newcomers here tend to be younger and therefore healthier. Again, that is not borne out by the facts, as studies demonstrate. One official Parliamentary report in 2007 stated that “minority ethnic groups generally have worse health than the overall population”. That pattern can be found in everything from mental health to disabilities.
Mass immigration also brings communication problems. Earlier this month I interviewed a GP, herself a European migrant, who told me that three quarters of the patients on her list do not have English as a first language and a quarter do not speak English at all. Yet there is a near taboo about addressing these points because of political correctness, just as we are meant to worship the NHS and blame all its problems on the Tories.
THE reality is, however, that Labour’s socialistic model of healthcare has never really worked. Its proponents boast that it is “the envy of the world” but not a single other developed nation has ever copied it precisely because it is so dysfunctional.
The NHS is a heavily politicised, ultra-unionised, publicly bankrolled monolith whose centrally-controlled structure breeds waste, mismanagement and inflexibility, as shown by a string of fiascos such as the non-existent £12billion computer or the 2004 GPs’ contract, which has all but destroyed the out-of-hours service.
The BBC moans that other western countries spend more on healthcare than Britain but that extra money comes not from the taxpayer but rather from charges, insurance and private contracts. Such commercial involvement would be treated as an outrage in Britain.
Yet the BBC, in its eagerness to indulge in political blackmail over funding, inadvertently proved how urgently genuine reform is needed.
‘BBC avoids subject of mass immigration’