Most NHS workers think Wes Streeting is badly failing the NHS

A new poll has shown that most NHS workers think health secretary Wes Streeting is failing the NHS, badly.

The NHS is suffering, and Streeting is making things worse

87% of NHS staff describe the NHS as currently being in a weak state

Wes Streeting specifically has been doing a bad job (53% – up 13% from last year).
Labour is handling healthcare badly (66% – up 13% from last year).
A continuation of Labour’s current policies will make the NHS even worse (40% – up 14% from last year).

Streeting — who has the support of millionaire donors and private healthcare lobbyists — has long coveted the job of Labour Party leader. But he barely won his own constituency in 2024, and his race-baiting local party has been haemorrhaging votes ever since.

The new poll of NHS workers, meanwhile, is a damning assessment of Streeting’s record as health secretary. And it should make any Labour MP think twice before trying to force him onto the country as prime minister.

NHS staff increasingly believe Wes Streeting is doing a bad job as health secretary and that the Labour government is handling the NHS badly

Streeting as health secretary
Good job: 22% (-3 from 19-28 Feb 2025)
Bad job: 53% (+13)

Labour handling of NHS
Well: 24% (-6)
Badly: 66%… pic.twitter.com/HCTlxa1kMQ

— YouGov (@YouGov) May 13, 2026

Stop Wes Streeting. Stop the privatisation.

Only 22% of NHS workers think Streeting has been doing a good job. And most essentially perceive there to have been almost no difference between conditions under the previous Conservative government and conditions under the current Labour government.

That’s hardly surprising when even the Guardian has been saying:

Labour is privatising the NHS in plain sight

EveryDoctor, meanwhile, has been insisting:

The NHS is being privatised, and it is so important that we pay attention to the way money is moving through Westminster…

And if we follow the money, we see that Wes Streeting is at the top of the list, having received at least £224,575 from people and corporations with private healthcare interests. EveryDoctor adds that:

Labour MPs received almost five times as much in donations from donors connected to private healthcare as all other MPs combined, according to EveryDoctor’s analysis of the MPs’ register of financial interests. We must ask why this is happening, at the same time as the Labour government has chosen to divert billions more into the private healthcare sector

Streeting has also been schmoozing with big technology firms, being particularly secretive about the dodgy NHS contract with evil tech giant Palantir.

As NHS staff know all too well, a Streeting government is bad news for the NHS. Because just like Tony Blair’s Labour previously, Labour today is also siphoning money away from the NHS and into the pockets of private healthcare corporations.

To stop this privatisation and save the NHS, we need to stop Wes Streeting.

Featured image via the Canary

Comments 1

D71 says:

2 months ago

The framing of every doctor, when they write: “the Labour government has chosen to divert billions more into the private healthcare sector”, is both understandable, and inaccurate. The billions given creates the private sector in question, it literally doesn’t exist until the money is there. The NHS funding isn’t buying pre-existing provision, it is creating private provision, which didn’t exist before the contract was awarded. It is not a genuine private sector, selling unnecessary junk to willing fools, but the provision of a national monopoly, from which it is impossible to not profit. This could be called contract capitalism. It’s not like the private sector can set-up lots of fully-staffed hospitals and wait for “customers” to turn up, or generate customers through marketing, it has to be forced by lump sum contracts with built-in ecxess to divert to dividends. It’s why private healthcare uses an insurance model, it’s a tax by another name, they couldn’t survive on a per-treatment basis, they need a continuous flow of income. In the public sector, this continuous flow of income is disingenuously called “waste”, but is anything but, it is simply an acknowledgement that staff on stand-by are always potentially needed, even if, at any given moment, there aren’t, for instance, enough seriously ill people to keep an ICU busy. If the NHS moved to a private insurance model, most of us couldn’t afford it and the exclusions would be terrifying (e.g. pre-existing conditions). As you keep rightly saying, the govt has a fiat currency, so can always afford NHS provision, with tax used to gradually withdraw that spending, to prevent a surplus of money. It has absolutely no need for private provision, it is simply corporate capture of a govt money stream.