Labour attacked from left and right for its morally corrupt blanket opposition to health reform

Nik Darlington 10.48am

Two important blogs appeared this morning. One is by a Conservative MP, one is by a former Labour party General Secretary. Both are about the NHS and, in their different ways, both identify the same problem: the Labour party’s stance on NHS reform.

Chris Skidmore is one of the most thoughtful of the 2010 Tory intake (he used to be an adviser to David Willetts, of course, where two brains are better than one). His blog for ConservativeHome is not exactly cerebral - it is more factional than phrenic - but it has a clarity of expression and fight that sadly has too often been lacking. Mr Skidmore is also an articulate historian. That he can write well clearly helps.

Burnham and Labour have set their face against an NHS that is centred around the needs of the patient, precisely what the Coalition’s reforms seek to achieve. They have become the party of anti-reform, anti-competition, anti-choice, and above all, anti-patient.

Peter Watt also happens to be one of the more thoughtful people in the Labour party. He regularly stands out as a voice of reason amid the silly squabbling, neither a fully-signed up Blairite nor a dyed-in-the-wool statist. In a blog for Labour Uncut, he attacks the Health & Social Care Bill in its current form - “a largely unnecessary piece of legislation” - which I cannot claim is an unreasonable position to take having questioned it myself.

But like Mr Skidmore, Peter Watt insists that the NHS must change. Reform is desirable and inevitable, which makes the Labour party’s opportunistic opposition to reform untenable.

…more reform is exactly what the NHS needs. The current legislation is clearly ill thought out and is rightly being resisted, but that does not mean that the NHS does not need to change. And if the Labour party really wants to save the NHS, it must aggressively embrace further change, not reject it. Because budgets will continue to be squeezed and efficiencies will still need to be found. At the same time patients will demand greater and greater choices, higher standards of care and service. This simply can’t be achieved without reform, even if money were no issue.

Labour’s shadow health secretary, Andrew Burnham, is censured from the left and from the right for hypocrisy and hysteria. Mr Skidmore writes:

…to listen to Andy Burnham, you would be forgiven for thinking that he was never a keen Blairite reformer of our public services. As Secretary of State for Health, he helped oversee an expansion of new providers in the NHS, particularly Independent Treatment Centres, the same expansion that this government backs, and that he now derides as privatisation. It was Andy Burnham who was happy to back an increase of £10 billion going to the private sector, between 2006-2010.  It was Andy Burnham who fought an election on a manifesto pledge to ”support an active role for the independent sector working alongside the NHS in the provision of care, particularly where they bring innovation.”

What a difference opposition makes. One of his first actions as shadow secretary was to fly in the face of expert consensus and declare that it was “irresponsible to increase NHS spending in real terms”, turning against the Coalition’s real-terms increases in NHS spending, despite knowing that the NHS is facing the toughest efficiency program in its history.

While Mr Watt, portraying Burnham more captive than co-opted, says:

Andy Burnham may be a supporter of competition and choice, but many of those rallying to the cause certainly aren’t. The Tories inept handling of a largely unnecessary piece of legislation has given them their chance. This is an opportunity to finally put a nail in the coffin of further reform and they are going for it. You can hear it in the rhetoric, the old cries of the NHS being “the best in the world”, of its great efficiency and how we need more cooperation and not more or any competition. All of which are highly debatable, no matter how much you love the NHS. So all in all, the prevailing mood within the Labour party is for less reform not more.

I have made no secret of my discomfort with the Bill, its presentation and its parliamentary management. But healthcare reform is essential.

The Labour party, lone sensible figures like Peter Watt aside, has behaved reprehensibly: a spiteful spasm of collective amnesia and nitwittedness.

Reforms begun under Tony Blair, by Alan Milburn and John Reid, were producing improvements in NHS outcomes. And the stubborn, statist and vested interests within the Labour party hated them for it. They hated them viscerally, for proving that the introduction of some choice, competition and independent provision could work.

The Labour party is, as Peter Watt writes, in its “comfort zone”, at the same time as the NHS, says Chris Skidmore, “faces a perfect storm of an ageing population and a boom in chronic illness and lifestyle-related diseases”. It is a thoroughly miserable, and morally corrupt, state of affairs.