Wes Streeting is right, the NHS is not the envy of the world - Bill Carmichael

It might make us feel a bit better about ourselves, but sadly it is simply untrue. On a whole range of measurements, including survival rates for cancer, strokes and heart attacks, the UK performs poorly compared to other advanced nations.

The care backlog in the UK is at a record high, with 7.2 million people waiting to start routine treatment in October this year, and this will only get worse because of a current wave of strikes by nurses and ambulance workers.

And it is telling that no other advanced country has copied the NHS model of state-provided health care. The best performing health care systems, such as the one in the Netherlands, provide universal care funded by private insurance companies, with the state picking up the bill for the premiums of the poor who cannot afford to pay.

Neither is it true that the NHS is underfunded. Spending on healthcare in the UK has risen to about 12 per cent of GDP, from 10 per cent pre-pandemic, which puts us broadly in line with the rest of western Europe.

There is also no such thing as “NHS cuts”, which are frequently cited as the reason for poor standards of care. Real terms spending on the NHS, after taking inflation into account, has risen every year since 2010, and rose rapidly - by about £50bn - during the Covid outbreak.

I spat my tea out one morning this week when Pat Cullen, leader of the Royal College of Nursing, accused the government of trying to run the NHS “on a shoestring”.

Well, if she is right then it is a mightily expensive shoestring. The Department of Health and Care spent a stonking £192bn in 2020/21, including almost £160bn for NHS England.

But such is the devotion to the NHS among the British public that politicians are terrified of even making a peep of criticism or suggestion that reform may be needed.

Former Chancellor of the Exchequer Nigel Lawson once said: “The National Health Service is the closest thing the English have to religion, with those who practise in it regarding themselves as a priesthood. This has made it quite extraordinarily difficult to reform.”

Even Boris Johnson, when he was Prime Minister, bored everyone witless by constantly repeating the mantra “our” NHS.

But this week a senior politician did summon the courage to criticise the NHS, and this resounding call for reform came from an unexpected quarter.

The Shadow Health Secretary Wes Streeting gave a speech in which he made clear that he would not pretend that the NHS was the envy of the world.

He said: “It is plain to see for anyone who uses the NHS that it is failing patients on a daily basis.

“We cannot continue pouring money into a 20th-century model of care that delivers late diagnosis and more expensive treatment.”

Mr Streeting, who last year was treated successfully for cancer in an NHS hospital, added: “Ironically, it is those voices from the left who oppose reform, who prove themselves to be the true conservatives.”

Mr Streeting laid out Labour’s plans for reforms including training 15,000 medical students and 5,000 community health workers a year and, most controversially, using spare capacity in the private sector to bring down NHS waiting lists.

That sent the trade unions and the Corbynista wing of his party into a screaming blue fit.

But whether you agree with these ideas for reform, and whether Labour will ever be in a position to put them into practice, is beside the point.

What is clear is that Mr Streeting has summoned up the bravery to challenge the broken status quo, while Conservative politicians are so terrified of the inevitable backlash from the public, that they pretend that everything in “our” NHS is tickety-boo.

As my elderly relatives became sick and infirm I had a lot of dealings with the NHS. Some of the care was brilliant, largely thanks to the efforts of dedicated and outstanding individuals. But the whole system seemed rickety and some of the care was nothing short of appalling.

In 1972 it took Richard Nixon, a renowned anti-communist hawk, to lead the rapprochement with China.

Perhaps it will take someone from the left, although the soft Blairite kind, such as Mr Streeting, to tell some uncomfortable truths about the NHS.