Leaders duel over NHS in pre-election debate
FIRST Minister Carwyn Jones decided attack was the best form of defence in the final televised leaders’ debate before next week’s Assembly elections when he declared that the “NHS is on the ballot paper in this election”.
The Welsh Labour leader used his opening statement to point to the spectacle of the junior doctors’ strike in England.
He said: “Tonight in England thousands of junior doctors are walking home from picket lines... If there is a greater contrast between what Labour is doing in Wales and what the Tories are doing in England I can’t think of one.”
But audience members quickly left all of the party leaders in no doubt about the scale of disquiet over the state of services.
A woman declared that NHS pioneer Aneurin Bevan would be “hanging his head in shame at the way cancer patients are given treatment in Wales”.
She claimed: “We are at the present time lagging behind England. And there are drug treatments that you can have across the border but you cannot have in this country.
“There are people in bed right now who are ill and would be a lot better off if they were over in England.”
A man described having an X-ray in a hospital “fit for the 19th century” who was told he would have to wait “three to four weeks” to have it returned.
Welsh Conservative leader Andrew RT Davies jumped at the opportunity to attack Labour’s record.
He said: “[You] can’t brush it under the carpet, Carwyn. You’ve been in charge for 17 years and you just haven’t made the improvements.”
Welsh Liberal Democrat leader Kirsty Williams hiked up the pressure, saying: “There are cancer surgical techniques that are not being delivered in Wales. I know a family that were left to beg – beg – for their young son, 36 years old, a father of two, to get the cancer operation that he needed.
“It shouldn’t come down to who shouts the loudest. It should be a right for every Welsh patient.”
Plaid Cymru leader Leanne Wood – who said the election was a two-horse race between her party and Labour – said the Welsh health service is “not working”.
Pressing for the integration of health and social services, she said Plaid was the only party with a “concrete plan to do exactly that”.
Describing meeting a patient who moved to England for cancer treatment, she said it was an “absolute scandal that patients in Wales do not get the same level of treatment as patients in other parts of the UK.”
She claimed the First Minister was “in complete denial about this being a problem”.
The Conservatives’ Mr Davies interjected: “In the Assembly Plaid Cymru have voted against the cancer drugs fund for Wales and they’ve supported Labour budgets that have cut the NHS Budget in the early years of the last Assembly.”
Labour’s Mr Jones then fired a shot at the Tories, saying: “I’ve sat in the Assembly for five years. Andrew talks about budgets – he watched our Budget being cut by 10% by his own party and said absolutely nothing at all about it.”
When an audience member asked Mr Davies if he would “raise the money for the NHS by imposing contracts on our valuable doctors and workers” he replied: “No.”
Ukip’s Nathan Gill won applause when he presented the multi-billion-pound US-EU Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) deal, currently under negotiation, as a threat to the NHS.
He said: “We completely and utterly oppose [TTIP]. We think if it goes through we will see the privatisation of our NHS...
“The only way you can fully oppose it is by leaving the EU on June 23.”
Wales Green Party leader Alice Hooker-Stroud said: “What we need to be looking at is actually creating a healthy society... It means making sure we have warm, affordable homes that make sure people don’t get ill.
“We need to make sure we have secure employment for people so that they don’t have issues perhaps with anxiety that leads to mental health problems.”