Wes Streeting has taken to saying things like ‘The NHS is broken'.
He does not say this is all the fault of Tory underfunding, although there are some swipes in that direction.
Instead, what he implies is that this is the result of the failure of NHS management and staff to increase their productivity. He hints, as a consequence, that increased productivity will be expected of them in the future.
He never notes that the bottlenecks preventing such things from happening are almost wholly beyond NHS control. Those external factors include the chronic underfunding of social care so that people cannot be safely discharged from hospitals, and the massive health problems created simultaneously by big sugar that wants to drive the UK population into ill health through vast over-consumption of highly addictive ultra-processed, and big pharma that wishes to over-medicalise the resulting conditions without pointing out that many of them are treatable or preventable if only we were better fed and drank less, neither of which is almost ever mentioned by a politician seeking to retain favour with both such groups.
The result is that, as the FT notes:
The UK is facing a worrying fall in applications by mature students to study strategically vital professions such as nursing and teaching, the head of the country's university admissions service has warned.
Jo Saxton, UCAS chief executive, said ahead of the release of A-level and BTec results on Thursday that while university applications from 18-year-olds were the second highest on record, the mature student market was struggling.
“The bit that concerns me is the decline in applications from mature students and, particularly, interest from that cohort in the kinds of courses that the nation really needs more of — so anything healthcare-aligned, nursing in particular, and teaching,” Saxton told a webinar organised by the Higher Education Policy Institute think-tank on Tuesday.
And, we need such applications: they provide the highest-quality admissions to these professions. So, the question is, why is that?
There are two obvious answers. One is the underfunding in both services, but especially the NHS, knowledge of which is now widespread, and about which it is clear Streeting intends to do nothing of consequence.
The other is that I think Streeting has done what is called a 'Ratner'. This is named after an event in 1991 when Gerald Ratner, the then CEO of his eponymously named jewellery chain, said to a conference of the Institute of Directors:
We also do cut-glass sherry decanters complete with six glasses on a silver-plated tray that your butler can serve you drinks on, all for £4.95. People say, "How can you sell this for such a low price?", I say, "because it's total crap."
Overnight he destroyed the credibility of his business by suggesting what it was selling was worthless. That is what careless, throwaway comments by bosses that undermine the efforts of those who work for them do.
It is my suggestion that this is exactly what Streeting has done. He has blamed NHS staff for the faults of the organisation they work for, very few, if any, of which have anything to do with them.
He can obviously do that: it is within his rights. But it is also exceptionally unwise. People do not want to work for organisations that blame them for failings that are not their responsibility. They know they will be abused as a result: that attitude is built into the comment from the outset.
The appeal of an undervalued and undermined NHS, which is the consequence of its treatment by successive governments, is failing when it comes to staff recruitment. Wes Streeting should think before commenting again, but I doubt he will. It's almost as if he has another agenda.
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Wes Streeting is a natural Tory. Why is he in the “Labour” party?
He has clearly been bought and paid for by the private healthcare industry. Total shill.
It is clear that Wes Streeting is either not very bright or not very moral, or most likely both. What is more worrying is what this says about Starmer’s judgement. Streeting is going to cause continual problems. Why was he ever appointed, and why hasn’t he been sacked already?
The more I read about Starmer, the less I can believe any of ‘his’ political appointments had anything to do with him.
Thank you and well said, Bill.
Readers and Richard may be interested in what happened similarly before and cease to wonder how the rust belt switched from voting for Obama in 2008 and 2012 to Trump in 2016 and may be in 2024:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckVbtZSfPRA and https://wallstreetonparade.com/2016/10/wikileaks-bombshell-emails-show-citigroup-had-major-role-in-shaping-and-staffing-obamas-first-term/.
We have been warned. It won’t be Trump here, but it could be Farage.
Thank you, Kim.
You are right about the character of Streeting. It’s probably what attracted him to his sponsors and vice versa at university.
As one can expect with such people and their handlers, much of his back story has been scrubbed from the internet, but it includes family links with the Krays, calling up the Zionist lobby for help in student politics (including ritual smears of the opposition), working at Stonewall after Cambridge and, in particular, their politically well-connected leader, being placed from Stonewall into consultancy for his (sic) expertise on public sector reform (No! Me, neither.) and then parachuted into Westminster politics. As a student politician, one of his opponents was woman, a socialist and practising Catholic, who later joined and was fired from the centrist toff Grauniad for one bit of socialist and working class impertinence too many and passed away not long after at a young age.
Streeting typifies the new breed of centrist western politicians in the service and pay of the elite and whose careers are carefully plotted by powerful sponsors. Obama and Buttigieg (Rhodes scholar and fake veteran), Macron (called the Mozart of Finance by his media mates, but laughed at by career banksters) and Attal (leveraged connections for his civil service positions) are similar. I have come across the type in person and can confidently say that the west is finished unless these types are banished from public life. Better and much more clever people than me like my friend Aurelien, a former UK government official now training future French officials and even military professionals, describe them and their perversion of politics much better than me.
Let me conclude that it’s not in Starmer’s gift to fire Streeting. That’s a Blair and Mandelson decision. So far, Streeting is doing what is required for their donors, Wall Street. We peasants do not matter.
It’s a bleak outlook, but I entirely agree. When poll after poll shows a complete disconnect between what people want and what parties offer, the only possible conclusion is as you say. It reminds me of Wolfgang Streeck’s How will Capitalism End, and his description of how elites have placed themselves beyond the reach of, and indeed above, democracy. His claim is that the project is complete, that democracy has been usurped and that we have moved beyond capitalism to the private control of public finance for private gain. Looks like it to me.
It’s all over now bar the looting.
And this means, in effect, that we live in a plutocracy masquerading as a democracy.
The question is, what can we do about it? If I were 50 or 60 years younger, I’d be metaphorically sharpening my pitchfork but experience has taught us that frightening the powers that be merely prompts them to come down more heavily on all dissent.
Is there some way that we can assemble a coalition of the decent and humane?
His agenda is the same as Blair’s.
According to New Labour’s ‘great sage’ no one cares who delivers a service just as long as they get it. That’s how we got PFI. Private sector nirvana!
That’s what Streeting is doing – paving the way for more private sector involvement – the good old ‘public bad/private good’ approach.
And then no one is supposed to look at what it is actually costing the government.
Then the treasury will start moaning about how much the privatised NHS costs, will want to reduce budgets and then before long they will turn the wrongly named NI contributions – which were originally conceived as a qualifying payment for free health care – into REAL insurance and you’ll see the cost of that go up as sick people get caught between the bean counters in the Treasury and the profiteers in health provider framework.
Streeting is a man on a mission.
The mission is himself.
Thank you and well said, PSR. Plus for yesterday’s reply about Reeves.
A few weeks before the election, some members of the shadow cabinet, including Lammy and Kinnock, were hosted for a week in NYC and DC by the Heritage Foundation and Koch brothers. That included discussions about replacing the NHS with what the Heritage Foundation adapted from Big Pharma owned Switzerland for Massachusetts (Romneycare) and the wider USA (Obamacare, which more than a few deluded centrists think is the NHS because St Barry set it up).
I looked to check out the Heritage Foundation meeting and found
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/labour-uk-us-trade-deal-trump-brexit-b2548760.html#comments-area
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/labour-mps-discussed-us-uk-144941337.html
I had to look Legatum (mentioned above by Yahoo ) an article against woke capitalism – Environmental, Social and Government centred investment. Plus a talk by Robert Jenrick talking to the Free Market Road Show saying our economic model is essentially broken.
Perhaps we didn’t give Mr K. Marx a fair hearing?
I don’t excuse Streeting at all. He seems to have no appreciation of how to begin to resolve the NHS problems, but I’d suggest that the reduction of mature students is as much to do with the ridiculous level of debt they will end up with along with low pay/ ability to repay, and also the high levels of stress that working in the NHS now involves. Perhaps potential mature students are more aware of these issues.
could this be?….underfund…declare a crisis….privatise?
“I criticise by analysis and enabling improvements and better solutions, not by just finding fault.”
(From Marcus Tullius Cicero)
True
Streeting expects to become very, very rich when the English NHS is fully privatised.
He, and many others in Labour, are already collecting pin money from American healthcare companies (and other foreign donors). The big bucks will come later.
It was obvious to those who bothered to take notice that the former Labour Party was now a “shilling party” but too many of the electorate tried to pretend this was just a front to get elected. What does that tell you about a country that needs that “front,” that “pretence”? It tells you that it’s a very backward country!
And thanks to politicians who keep “reorganising”, demanding “efficiency savings” and treating it like a business, as if it’s a health supermarket. And he will assuredly, like his predecessors, make things worse.
I forgot to add that Streeting is the Blair and Mandelson candidate to replace Starmer, ideally before the next election. Their back up is Darren Jones. The pair don’t think Starmer is radical enough and lacks the freshness, in PR terms, of Streeting. Starmer would prefer Reeves. The UK is stuffed in any case.
But why does @BBC never ask Streeting ‘did you take donations from private healthcare interests?’
or ‘has the last ten years of reduced NHS funding compared with the 10 years before 2010, helped to casue the trippling of the NHS waiting list and 100,000 vacancies?’
or ‘how will giving NHS money to the private sector help to mend the NHS?’
Thank you, Andrew.
You ask: “But why does @BBC never ask Streeting ‘did you take donations from private healthcare interests?”
Many BBC presenters, including the Today programme team, are freelance and have other jobs, e.g. voicing over corporate films, moderating business conference panels, providing insights to business, making opening remarks at business events. They won’t dare put at risk their main sources of income. They don’t declare this additional income, either.
This is also why experts like Richard are kept off air.
I will spare Richard the risk of naming and shaming the big offenders. One former editor, who later flounced off to set up a centrist podcast with two colleagues much loved by deluded centrists, served in the US, making a name provoking Trump to the delight of his centrist only fans, and made hundreds of thousands for big tobacco, which was never declared.
The BBC has an inflated sense of itself and likes to say the rest of the world looks up to it. Please rest assured that the rest of the world, apart from, perhaps, some Americans who still love an English accent and some colonial cringe types elsewhere, certainly doesn’t. The rest of the world sees the BBC as the UK government and establishment vuvuzela.
“It is my suggestion that this is exactly what Streeting has done. He has blamed NHS staff for the faults of the organisation they work for”
How dare he suggest that faults in the NHS might have something to do with the people who run the NHS !!!
Funny how the people who ran the NHS back in2004-10 managed to improve the service immensely- did they all leave and get replaced by idiots? Or did having some decent funding help?
Thank you, Ali.
I would say both.
A decade ago, a politically connected friend of a friend had her London Business School MBA paid for by a SW London NHS trust and left soon after to make even more money. The local Tory party had influential members. She had no qualifications for and desire to be working in the NHS. All that upset our mutual friend.
And the people who have no money to buy food are starving because they don’t use their cooking skills properly.
I hope you are being ironic
The UK is heading for a two tier health system.
For the vast majority, basic care: you are lucky to get this, so be thankful. Why are you moaning about losing your legs? You are still alive aren’t you.
For the rest: no problem, full health service.
Thank you to David Willetts and Ian Stevenson above.
@ Ian: The Heritage Foundation has facilitated the rapprochement between Labour and Trump camp, to the extent that Lammy has now chewed wasps / walked back his views on Trump. I will keep my views on Lammy to myself. This is also why there’s no Labour leadership interest in a rapprochement with the EU, not that the EU wants or needs one, as Labour is now owned by Wall Street.
Although AliB cites the improvements from 2004 under Labour and it’s true that funding went up got the NHS from approx 4%GDP to 8% during that time, the agenda that is playing out at present was already begun. The Chief Executive Officer at the CCG created in my district in 2012( after the 2012 Act was passed) had been sent over to the States in 2003 by Blair’s Government because they were a Civil Servant at that time. So there they were in the US in 2003 and 2004, studying the workings of Humana and Keizer Permenente. (Health Maintenance Organisations or HMOs). Then they were appointed to run the CCG which had the ‘front’ of being GPs in control. But even by 2011 there were many subsections of NHS services mandated by Govt to be ‘outsourced’ in other words privatised, from Asthma to Wheelchairs including diabetes, community services like district nurses and home visits, which sometimes were formed as community interest companies by the entrepreneurial members of the Primary Care Trusts.
At the same time, hospitals had to appoint ’managers’ who disregarded good nursing practice in favour of financial efficiency. So this was embedded by 2008 and a cohort of nurses who could remember how nursing should be done were ashamed at how it had to be worked in that time.
The blossoming of privatisation and the dismantling of the NHS has deep roots.