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Speak your wait machine
Most of the contenders to be Labour leader nod their head solemnly when asked if there should be a root and branch look at the party’s failures in the 2019 election. Yet so far, there’s been precious little attention given to Jeremy Corbyn’s weakness on what he thought was his strongest card: the NHS.
Not a day went by without Corbyn claiming the Tories would privatise the health service or somehow sell it off to American private companies. “Not for sale!” went the chant from his most avid supporters wherever he went. Talking to many of them on the campaign trail, they genuinely believed it to be true, despite the lack of hard evidence.
What was really curious was how Labour’s entire election campaign seemed to be based on Channel 4’s Dispatches programme, ‘Trump’s Plan For The NHS’, that was aired days after the election began. The clue lay in the title: yes, Dispatches did some excellent work highlighting that trade officials had discussed what Trump wanted on drug pricing, but there was no smoking gun showing Tory ministers would give him what he wanted.
During the campaign, we hacks were summoned to a morning press conference and told there would be a dramatic revelation. Corbyn and shadow trade secretary Barry Gardiner (rather significantly, shadow health secretary Jon Ashworth wasn’t invited and seemed totally kept out of the loop) waved around 451 pages of ‘secret’ papers detailing the talks with the US. But again there was precious little in the way of hard evidence.
It’s true that at some moments during the campaign the Tories were worried about the cut-through of the ‘NHS for sale’ claim. But with Boris Johnson promising his own plans to pump billions into the system, he appeared to neutralise the issue. One of the most shocking polls of the entire election was the YouGov finding that Johnson was as equally trusted on the NHS as Corbyn (both on 27%).
Our own HuffPost/Edelman focus group of swing voters in Watford found they simply didn’t believe that any party would be stupid enough to privatise the NHS. Like many other Corbyn pledges, they found it simply not credible.
And yet what really did cause the only real panic in Conservative ranks was the Mirror and Yorkshire Press story (note, not anything Labour itself came up with) about four-year-old Jack Williment sleeping on the floor of a Leeds hospital because of a shortage of beds. But it was the final week of the campaign and was ultimately washed away by the Johnson landslide.
But just imagine if - instead of the ‘NHS for sale’ claim - Corbyn and Ashworth had spent the campaign, indeed had spent the previous year, talking repeatedly about the many other instances of the human cost of the crisis in A&E. It seemed Labour forgot that the real, lived experience of voters is often much more powerful than theorising about a future threat. And with the Tories in power for nearly a decade, it was the most powerful reminder that Johnson’s party was responsible.
It was years of Tory underfunding of the NHS that ensured so much impact for Tony Blair’s ‘24 hours to save the NHS’ line on the eve of 1997 polling day. And, crucially, it was waiting lists that were the key to making a direct connection to millions of voters of all party backgrounds. Not for nothing was one of Blair’s pledgecard pledges (a digestible 5 pledges, rather than 50) to cut NHS waiting lists by treating an extra 100,000 patients.
This week, both the scale of the crisis in the NHS - and the scale of Labour’s failure to capitalise on it - were highlighted starkly by the latest A&E figures. They weren’t just bad. They were catastrophically bad, tectonic-plate shifting bad. Look at this chart (hat-tip to the ever-brilliant Health Service Journal) showing how the number of patients meeting the four-hour target has fallen off a cliff this December. 100,000 people left waiting on trolleys is a hell of an indictment of any government.
The target of 95% of patients being seen within four hours was introduced by Labour in 2004, but hasn’t been met since 2015. And this isn’t an academic exercise. Longer waits on trolleys lead not to just more pain and discomfort but to more deaths. The NHS’s Emergency Care Intensive Support Team (ECIST) says anything less than 90% means that patients will be harmed.
When the dire figures were raised at the Lobby briefing yesterday, the PM’s official spokesman read out a speak-your-weight-machine line that “winter is always challenging” for the NHS. He repeated the mantra that there would be a “record cash boost” for the health service, even though it’s not enough money to improve care and meet targets.
Don’t be surprised if the Tories now scrap (or tweak) the waiting targets to spirit this problem away even further from public view. Labour’s Jon Ashworth did indeed yesterday try to highlight what he called “a winter of abject misery for patients”. Yet maybe because Labour is so embroiled with its own leadership election, maybe because of sheer political fatigue, it seemed no one was listening.
The voters certainly weren’t listening to Corbyn last month. And perhaps one really useful lesson of that election is that Labour should now stop talking about ‘our NHS’, at least in party terms. Because that phrase was often accompanied by a bromide pointing out a Labour government created the health service, it too often felt like Labour was saying that it - rather than the public - owned the NHS.
Whisper it quietly, but NHS staff vote Tory too. And in even greater numbers when the Opposition lacks credibility.
Quote Of The Day
“I can’t help but think, ‘You can’t lie to your family; how could I ever trust you?’”
Jess Phillips on Boris Johnson’s marital infidelity
Friday Cheat Sheet
Sinn Féin have said they will re-enter devolved government in Northern Ireland after three years of deadlock. The DUP had earlier also given a cautious welcome to a draft deal to restore Stormont’s political institutions. The PM called it ‘a great step forward’.
Deputy Labour leadership contender Clive Lewis has suggested there should be a “referendum on the future of the Royal Family”.
Former Tony Blair chief of staff Jonathan Powell told the Institute for Government’s podcast that Dominic Cummings would not be in government by the end of the year, joking he may “end up like Rasputin in the River Neva in chains”.
A YouGov poll found that 42% of the public would give Jeremy Corbyn ‘0 out of 10’ for his leadership. Which is very close to the 43% who voted Tory last month.
What I’m Reading
Looking To The Future In Bleak Times - Gary Younge, The Guardian
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