Made In Downing Street: Blame The Tories For The NHS Crisis

Don’t blame it on the nurses, 

Don’t blame it on the Covid, 

Don’t blame it on the Mick Lynch, 

Blame it on the Tories.

Your National Health Service is facing the worst crisis in its history. 

You have a choice. 

You can swallow the overwhelmingly dishonest Tory supporting mainstream media medicine if you wish - what with the British press being the least trusted in Europe - or you can listen to the medical professionals on the ground. 

It’s a no-brainer for me. 

I don’t care about Harry’s new book, or his numerous appearances on Netflix and ITV. Why would I? 

If his warts-and-all tale of privileged woe hastens the departure of the monarchy then he has served a purpose, but the only purpose he is serving at the moment, unintentionally, is one that presents a gift for the British media because it means they can bury the NHS crisis on page 16 next to the daily horoscopes. 

Surely nobody really cares about William having a bigger bedroom than Harry when thousands of ordinary people, today, are unable to get a bed in an NHS hospital because there are no beds to put them in? 

A decade of painful neglect by successive Conservative governments has weakened the NHS to the point of imminent collapse. 

The catastrophic decline of the NHS isn’t exclusively the fault of the Conservatives. New Labour accelerated private sector involvement in healthcare provision during their years in government, but history will note that Labour did cut waiting lists, they did increase NHS spending, and patient satisfaction was at its highest. 

Starmer’s Labour is about as popular with NHS workers right now as Vladimir Putin is in Kyiv. New New Labour’s NHS proposals, headed up by the intolerable Blairite diehard, Wes Streeting, show a genuine lack of ambition and respect for our most treasured socialist creation, the National Health Service. 

But I digress. The problems we face today are very much a Conservative problem.

From Cameron in 2010 through to Sunak today, the blame belongs to the people in charge. They can’t even blame the last Labour government now because Labour haven’t been anywhere near power for 12 years.

What did the Tories think would happen if they  routinely deny the health service of the vital funding that it needs? Isn’t it obvious? 

What did the Tories think would happen if they failed to address the growing workforce crisis that has left the NHS with too few staff, not enough equipment, and a load of outdated buildings in urgent need of upgrading? 

You don’t have to be a cynic to claim the apocalyptic scenes witnessed in hospitals up and down the land today are entirely intentional. 

If you take your car to the garage for a service and the mechanic tells you that you have a puncture in one of your tyres, and you fail to replace it, there’s every chance your tyre will go bang and the consequences will be far greater than if you were to front the cost of a replacement tyre when you needed to do so. 

The NHS has been that tyre for the past twelve years. What started as a slow puncture is now an irreparable blow-out. The Tories have lost control of the car and we are hurtling towards a fucking great ditch at breakneck speeds. 

The perilous state our NHS finds itself in today hasn’t happened by mistake, but by design. This is the Tory way - run public services into the ground and get the private firms to ride to the rescue. 

Yet private sector involvement rarely improves public services because private companies need to make a profit before the workers and the end users are given a second thought. It’s not rocket science. 

The Tories were bankrolled by private health in opposition as they drew up secret plans to put market forces at the heart of the NHS. 

Once in Government, MPs and peers with links to private healthcare voted it through without so much as a sniff of a mandate from the public. 

The scale and pace of private companies’ involvement in the NHS has turbocharged following the introduction of the 2012 Health and Social Care Act. 

After the introduction of the HSC Act, the privatisation list expanded to include GP surgeries and Out of Hours services, urgent care and minor injury units, diagnostic services, maternity care, elective (non-emergency) surgery, community nursing and a range of other community services such as physiotherapy, ambulance services, and prison health. 

Private companies also became involved in running entire hospitals, including A&E departments. 

We have known about the corruption, the cronyism, and the numerous links between the Conservative party and the private healthcare sector for as long as I can remember. 

Covid-19 and the surely-criminal awarding of multi-billion pound contracts to the friends and donors of the Tory party simply underlined what we have been saying for years. 

But now the rest of the country - many of whom are really feeling the pinch right now - have seen the blatant corruption for themselves, and they don’t like what they see. They feel that outrage that you have been feeling since 2010. 

I don’t think I can repeat this often enough. 

The depressingly never ending waiting lists didn’t happen by accident.

The 99 hour wait on a trolley in a corridor at the Great Western Hospital in Swindon didn’t happen by accident. 

The chronic underfunding and the managed decline of health and social care throughout the last 12 years didn’t happen by accident. 

The £5,000 real terms cut to a nurses wages since 2010 leading to the necessary strike action that we see today didn’t happen by accident. 

The loss of 25,000 NHS beds leading to the UK having the lowest number of hospital beds per head of population in Europe after Sweden, and just one-third the number of Germany didn’t happen by accident. 

The tragic deaths of 300 to 500 people a week as a result of delays to emergency care didn’t happen by accident. 

The 2012 Health and Social Care Act effectively abolishing the NHS, as we knew it, just short of its 65th birthday didn’t happen by accident. 

The struggle to get an appointment with your GP, the five year wait for an ADHD consultation, the extortionate and utterly immoral cost of parking at an NHS hospital for both staff and patients, NONE of this did not happen by accident. 

It’s the Tories fault. All roads lead to CCHQ. Cameron, Lansley, Osborne, May, Hammond, Johnson, Sunak, Kwarteng, Hunt, Hancock, Truss, Raab, Gove, Dorries, Coffey, that ridiculous Mogg creature, Shapps, Javid, Barclay.

These are the people to blame for the fucking diabolical mess the NHS, our NHS, finds itself in. They have blood on their hands.

It’s not COVID’s fault, it’s not the doing of Harry and Meghan, it’s got absolutely nothing to do with the conflict in Ukraine, and you can’t even pin this one on Jeremy Corbyn, the NHS is on life support, struggling for breath, because of the wilful neglect of successive Conservative administrations. 

And for me, as a socialist that looks at our magnificent NHS with a genuine sense of pride, this entirely intentional destruction of our health service - that was once the envy of the world - is completely and utterly unforgivable.

Save our NHS, and fuck the Tories. 

Thanks for reading. 

Rachael 

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