We knew

Let’s face it we all knew, how could you not know? If it takes hours for ambulances to turn up, if waiting times at A&E are consistently hours if not days long, then people with serious emergencies or who have had life threatening accidents are going to die. If you cannot get a GPs appointment for weeks you are going to iller, quicker. If the queue for specialists is years long you, are going to die before you get seen.

We all knew this.

The news that the crisis in A&E alone over the last several years has been costing 14,000 lives every year, should not be a shock at all. Then on top of that the total failure to improve cancer detection and a thousand other things helps explain why the NHS is no longer the world beating system it was under the last Labour government.

The causes have included Covid but also austerity, totally incompetent mismanagement by successive health secretaries and botched reforms by the Tories. And if there had been enough money and the reforms had not been botched then Covid would not have killed so many.

I imagine that the Tory front bench will insist that the health service was fine when they last saw it, that they did spend more and that it is all the fault of greedy porters or overpaid cleaning staff.

But the fact is that just like everything else, you get what you pay for and the Tory party wasn’t willing to pay for the best. It calculated, quite rightly that promising tax cuts and not collecting the data on deaths would be enough to keep it in power.

It should apologise and beg our forgiveness on its knees but it won’t. Apparently it now says the government needs to turn "rhetoric into action". The cynicism of that statement beggars belief.

We should also apologise as a nation to the staff of the NHS who have worked wonders to keep it going and have been thanked by the Tories with overwork, pay cuts, and vitriolic attacks on their capabilities, devotion and claims. Claims which turned out to be an underestimate of the damage that 14 years of Tory rule have done to the health of the nation.

We all knew, for shame.

Jonty’s Jottings

Economics, trade and Brexit, not necessarily in that order but the dog always comes first.

By Jonty Bloom Media