The Left are doing a very bad job of being advocates for the NHS

The NHS will kill you.  If it doesn’t kill you it will ensure that you die starved of water and food and deprived of all dignity.  To fund this departure experience you, the tax payer, spend your whole life paying way over the odds for this service.  And, to add insult to injury the vast majority of this money is going to these shady characters called “managers” and not enough going to modern day saints or “doctors”. Your only salvation is to welcome private medical companies into the NHS, because Virgin and BUPA sponsor marathons, so they must be healthy and have lots of money to give to the NHS.

Shockingly this sketch is really not that far from the narrative the British press has peddled about NHS over the last year.  Mid-Staffs, The Keogh Report, The Liverpool Care Pathway and funding crisis after funding crisis are just part of a constant account of poor care and incompetence in the NHS.  The response of the government has been to provide little in the way of defence of the NHS and its staff.  Hunt has simply, and very competently, continued the Tory master plan laid out by Liam Fox 2002 to discredit and then dismember the NHS.

The NHS is desperately in need of an advocate.  But due to a fundamental misunderstanding of what the NHS is, those of us on left are doing a very bad job of being this.

The NHS is a system of health care.  It is a system through which tax money is spent, care rationed and provided and results recorded.  It is a system that has notable flaws, which are far outweighed by its considerable strengths.  It is a system that needs to constantly evolve in order to keep pace with the changing nature and distribution of health in our society.

What it is not is a living being.  It is not a sports team that you can blindly support.  It is not a religion that you commit to absolutely.  And, while these may be fairly obvious points, many of us on the left treat the NHS as if it is all of these things.

The general response to the Keogh Report, led by some of the big thinkers on the left, was, as it all too often is, some variation of “I love the NHS”.  Every year we celebrate the birthday of the NHS (which when you think about it, is just a little strange).  And, rather than precisely and accurately put the case against widespread private involvement in the NHS, based on facts and figures, we shout ourselves into a frenzy about people making money from Grandma’s death, and then go home thinking we fought the good fight.

Those of us who believe in a universal system of health care, funded through taxation, free at the point of use, urgently need to participate in the debate surrounding the NHS as thinking, considered advocates rather than as fans, supporters or followers.  Understanding and fixing what happened at Mid-Staffs is not possible through rose tinted glasses.  Even less so if we willingly fail to recognise the problems that exist.

We are losing the debate over the NHS because we are simply ignoring the big questions:  How do we maintain standards of care in an increasingly fragmented system?  How do we ensure compassion and care matches clinical excellence?  How do we keep the NHS model viable for the next 50 years?  Serious efforts to answer these questions, and confront uncomfortable truths, would do far more for the NHS than slightly bizarre statements of love and affection.