Streeting is the one collapsing the NHS, not the strikers he’s blaming

Wes Streeting has claimed that the decision of doctors to strike over the government’s pay obstinacy, during flu season, is threatening to collapse the NHS. He wrote in the Times:

Christmas strikes could be the Jenga piece that collapses the tower.

Really, Wes? Unsurprisingly, he’s a red-Tory hypocrite mimicking the lines of the Tory health secretaries that preceded him.

Winter always places more stress on NHS resources and staff, but fourteen years of Tory predation, privatisation and fragmentation meant that for years the NHS had been in what many term a ‘year-round winter crisis’. Streeting has done nothing to improve that – and much to make it worse.

Even before Streeting got into the health seat under Starmer, he declared that his plan to fix the NHS was to increase privatisation. That would be more of the same Tory measures that had led to the collapse. He also commissioned a group of health-privatisation enthusiasts led by cross-bench (former Labour) peer Ara Darzi to create a ‘ten year plan’ of slash-and-burn measures to further privatise and fragment the health service. Then, he appointed another health privatiser to oversee the plan’s implementation – and said he was quite prepared to let the NHS ‘die’ if it did not submit to his ‘reform’.

Streeting is destroying the NHS

Now, while still refusing to meet the reasonable demands of NHS doctors for the restoration of pay withered by years of Tory government, Streeting claims that the NHS is in danger of ‘collapse’ – but not because of his intransigence on pay, his privatisation plans, and his determination to accelerate the Tory war on the NHS instead of undoing it. Instead, he is scaremongering that doctors’ collective action is the cause – an outright lie, since doctors are ensuring that essential cover is in place during strike periods.

BMA resident doctors committee chairman Dr Jack Fletcher, said:

It is horrible for anyone to be suffering with flu, we are not diminishing the impact of that, but Mr Streeting should not be scaremongering the public into thinking that the NHS will not be able to look after them and their loved ones.

[Streeting is] laying the blame for the failings of the NHS to cope with an outbreak of flu at the feet of resident doctors and yet he is strangely reluctant to turn that concern into action and come to the negotiating table”.

What is cruel and calculated is the way in which the Health Secretary fails to have any engagement with us outside strikes and then comes to us with an offer he knows is poor and expects us to just accept it within 24 hours.

Since he became health secretary Streeting has awarded billions in additional contracts to private health companies and expanded the use of ‘associate’ doctors without medical training, removing training resources from doctors – all Tory practices he has enthusiastically accelerated. He has begun plans to force people to take dangerous weight-loss drugs, meddled in the diagnoses of medical experts and, instead of reducing the administrative burden on hospitals he has introduced ‘league tables’ that experts say will damage the NHS even further – all this on top of his ‘Darzi’ war on the NHS as a whole.

The BMA’s criticism of Streeting’s scaremongering is perfectly accurate, but it doesn’t go far enough. Streeting and his boss Keir Starmer are not just scaremongering – like any Tories, they are actively and intentionally pushing the NHS further into collapse.

Featured image via the Canary