There’s still a conspiracy of silence about the NHS’S failures

Bureaucracy breeds bureaucracy. T’was ever thus, and a new report from Policy Exchange on the NHS makes for stark reading. Its headline is that the number of NHS bureaucrats has doubled in the last two years, while the number of front-line nurses has only risen by 7 per cent. Given that this period coincided with a pandemic, you might have thought the increases would have been the other way around.

Seven years ago, I wrote a short polemical book called The NHS: Things That Need To Be Said. In part, I wrote it because in 2012 the health service contributed to the death of my mother. Little did I know that a year after my book came out, it would also contribute to the death of my father.

All the problems I identified back then are still present today, and more so. I catalogued the catastrophic decline in NHS beds since 1980. Jeremy Hunt, the then health secretary, promised to address the issue. But since 2015, we’ve lost another 12,000 beds. This is not a politically driven policy, it’s a policy driven by the burgeoning bureaucracy at NHS England, and their counterparts across the UK.

Lack of funding can no longer be the excuse for poor outcomes compared with our European neighbours. We now spend about as much as France on health, yet across the board (with the exception of diabetic amputations) we continue to underperform in European league tables. Politicians still pay homage to the religion of the NHS, yet the public seems to be waking up to its failings. According to the National Centre for Social Research, only 36 per cent of people are now happy with the NHS and the way it is run.

Twenty two years ago, when Ann Widdecombe was shadow health secretary, she said that we’d never get a modern day NHS, fit for the 21st century, until we decided what we actually wanted from it, and what it should or shouldn’t do. Almost a quarter of a century later, that debate has still not been had because politicians across the spectrum are afraid to have it. The end of the pandemic is the perfect time for a reset, but I see little sign of it happening.

It’s not just the NHS where public confidence is falling. It’s an affliction suffered by the police, too – and no wonder. Some 25,000 “non-crime hate incidents” are recorded by police each year. These are incidents where no crime has actually been committed but someone’s been a little bit offended. Why on earth are the police devoting depleted resources to investigating things that are not only not crimes, but could fall under the banner of thought crimes? It’s not overstating it to describe this as “Orwellian”.

So instead of investigating real crimes, like burglary, theft and drug offences, chief constables are ordering their detectives to waste their time on a wokeish agenda that serves no one apart from the virtue-signallers. Her Majesty’s new Chief Inspector of Constabulary, Andy Cooke, has said forces are busy enough as it is without becoming the thought police. He’s right. They need to get a grip, and fast.

Since 2016, ultraremainers have delighted in telling us that the reason the UK has performed terribly in the Eurovision Song Contest is that Europe hates us for voting to leave the EU. This Saturday’s result gave the lie to that ridiculous assertion. We actually won. Well, we would have, if Putin hadn’t invaded Ukraine. Even Germany and France both gave us the famous “douze points”. I imagine Emmanuel Macron passed out when he heard what his jury had done. The reason we did so well this year was because our song was genuinely good, unlike in every year since 2016. It’s that simple.