Ignore Starmer’s vacuous promises. Labour’s fanatical ideology means it can never cure the sickness in the NHS

When I was born in 1948, this country was mainly Christian. Today, Britain has a dangerous new religion — the cult of the national health Service.

Any criticism of our sacred nhS is sacrilege, and anyone who dares propose reforms risks being denounced as a heretic. In the eyes of true believers, the only failing of the health service is that there’s never enough money to pay for it.

The solution: fling more billions in the collection plate.

Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer knows his followers will never allow him to make the structural changes the nhS so desperately needs. he daren’t even name them.

That’s why his pledges yesterday to tackle what he called the three ‘biggest killers’ — heart disease, cancer and suicide — rang so hollow.

Blasphemy

Labour’s internal politics mean that Starmer will never cure the most insidious sickness in the nhS: its bloated bureaucracy. All he can do is shovel more funding into the black hole and watch the problems get worse.

The fact is that our centralised, Soviet- style, state-run health service cannot deteriorate much further before it breaks down completely. It is already failing millions, leaving them to suffer and die.

That is what makes the Government’s quietly radical new reforms so significant. These, it emerged yesterday, begin with the introduction of a new feature in the nhS app that will enable patients to opt for medical treatment at private hospitals, with the costs borne by the health service.

This represents a practical solution, and probably our best hope in the short-term of cutting waiting lists for procedures such as hip replacements, cataract surgery and even some heart work. But to Labour’s nhS fundamentalists and fanatics, the mere suggestion is blasphemy.

Dishonestly, they insist that any departure from state funding will create a two-tier health service, where only the wealthy will be able to access life-saving surgery.

This is pure dogma. In most european countries, healthcare is also available free at the point of delivery. But the private sector works alongside public services. In France, for instance, you can go to a state-run hospital and have cancer treatment with a private provider — funded by the taxpayers. This is not only more efficient than the British system, it’s cheaper, too.

This option is currently impossible in the UK, because anyone who proposes it is accused of wanting to ‘sell off our beloved nhS’. Yet France’s healthcare outcomes speak for themselves.

When I suggested on BBC’s newsnight in 2017 that private healthcare companies could be the system’s saviour, not its destruction, I described the nhS as ‘the last bastion of Communism in europe’. That brought an avalanche of criticism down upon me.

But since then it has become even more monolithic, inefficient and unmanageable. Those of us who work in it — I’ve been a doctor for 51 years — know what a joyless environment it has become.

When I was young, doctors and nurses loved working in the nhS. every day brought the opportunity to save some lives and change others. now, every day seems to bring another bout of ‘diversity training’ or fresh edict on whatever woke language is now deemed acceptable.

The more politically correct the phraseology, the more dehumanised the nhS becomes. Worst of all is the current trend to label patients as ‘service users’. That treats human beings as if they were cans of peas, rattling along a conveyor belt.

As long as the bureaucrats care more about words than people, real change cannot happen. Instead, we’ll have vacuous promises and verbiage of the sort served up by Starmer at an ambulance station in essex yesterday.

The Labour leader pledged to reduce deaths from heart disease and strokes by a quarter over ten years. It’s a laudable aim, and one that might be possible if radical changes to healthcare were actually implemented — such as introducing regular lipid checks to monitor cholesterol levels in those more at risk.

But how can people get preventative cholesterol checkups three or four times a year, if they can’t even see a GP? Many patients who have cardiac procedures to insert stents into constricted arteries report that follow-up care is negligible — with no one checking that their symptoms have eased or even asking whether they’ve managed to give up smoking.

In fact, it’s common for people suffering chest pains to wait more than an hour for an ambulance. earlier this year, emergency services revealed the response time for heart attacks and strokes is an abysmal one hour 33 minutes, more than 50 per cent longer than the previous nadir.

Despair

Starmer’s promise to drastically reduce fatalities is just hot air. So is his guarantee to prioritise mental healthcare and cut suicides. And as for his pledge on cancer, my own speciality — well, I despair.

When new patients are referred to cancer consultants, the target is for them to be seen within two weeks. Across the country, only 70 per cent are seen within that time — and in the worst regions it is just 60 per cent.

Then there is a 62-day target for starting treatment. When I tell my european colleagues about this figure, their reaction is disbelief. Survival chances typically drop by ten per cent for each month that cancer treatment is delayed. Tackling these delays must be the very minimum required to save more lives. Starmer’s vague, uncosted proposals do nothing to address the problem. he knows Labour’s membership would never allow him to introduce the policies that would make change possible — changes that the Tories are already trying to address.

We know it can be done, because private enterprise has already achieved it in other sectors, such as travel. Most older people will remember when international flights were prohibitively expensive, a service aimed at the luxury market — until the budget airlines came along.

Political

Or consider the unprivatised British Telecom in the 1960s and 1970s, when people could wait weeks or months for a new phone line. The market created efficiencies.

Similarly, we have to break the monopoly of healthcare. The Care Quality Commission, the independent regulator of health and social care in england, is an ineffective, time- wasting inspectorate whose senior posts are filled by failed middle managers, talking an obscure jargon of their own. They have lost sight of what patients need.

One quick and easy tweak would be to introduce a voucher system, allowing patients to choose where they go for treatment.

If you think that’s unworkable, consider this: opticians, once part of the nhS, have long since gone private, though children and other groups are still eligible for free eye tests and nhS vouchers towards the cost of glasses.

When you need an eye test, you can usually book one within a day or two. Unlike GPs and consultants, opticians do not expect people to wait for months — because they’d soon go out of business if they did.

It isn’t hard to understand. But in a country that treats its health service as a sacred cow, it’s very hard to fix.

And Keir Starmer’s empty promises will do nothing to change that. healthcare is just too important to be a political game.