Cruelty has NEVER been “normal” in the NHS

In 1991 Gerald Ratner – Chief Executive of Ratner’s, the world’s biggest jeweler and one of the most visible brands on the British high street – gave a speech at the Institute of Directors in which he described some of the products sold by his company as “total crap”. Almost overnight, the company collapsed. Today, ‘doing a Ratner’ has become an infamous comparison for business executives who destroy their businesses by trashing their own brand in public.

This week, aided and abetted by Jeremy Hunt and Nick Boles, David Cameron has truly arrived as the political heir to the Ratner throne.

Speaking candidly to a Tory think tank, the Telegraph reported that thwarted Tory moderniser Boles still bemoaned the appeal of the Conservatives eight years after beginning it’s widely derided ‘detoxification’ strategy. Without so much as a passing reference to the work of David Icke, the Telegraph splashed ‘Young see us as Aliens, says Tory minister Nick Boles’. It continued:

‘Many regard the Tories as the “party of the rich”, he said, while others “doubt our motives.’

Not to be outdone, No.10 staged a spectacular brand trashing intervention of its own.

The Sun reported ‘ “Get rid of all the green crap” David Cameron tells No10’ describing the move as ‘a huge U-turn on Eco policies’. They were right. Cameron’s deceitful husky hugging was a central element of his effort to detoxify the Tory Party and his public trashing of the brand he tried to create illustrates Boles’ point. No wonder the public doesn’t trust the motives of Cameron or his party.

In what now looks like an uncanny prophecy, in May 2011, Gerald Ratner told the Daily. Mail that “Doing a Ratner” ‘still comes top of the worst decisions ever’. He continued ‘…what I said was construed as making fun of my customers…But it came at a time when people couldn’t pay their electricity bills.”

Unable to respond to the cost of living crisis he has created, Cameron is following the Ratner playbook to the letter.

But it’s the incessant and deliberate attempt of the Tories to destroy the NHS brand that is so toxic for David Cameron.

In 1997, the incoming Labour government inherited an NHS on its knees; starved of resources and facing collapse. Labour increased the numbers of doctors and nurses in the NHS and established the largest hospital building programme our country has ever seen. When Labour left office, it left an NHS with the lowest ever waiting times and the highest ever levels of patient satisfaction. The US-based international health policy think tank, the Commonwealth Fund, rated the NHS as one of the best, most effective and efficient healthcare services in the world.

Notwithstanding the unrepresentative and unacceptable failings at some hospitals – Mid Staffordshire being the most notorious example – the public understands Labour’s NHS record and overwhelmingly believes that Labour will best support patients’ needs and the health service that they rely on.

Given the Tories’ naked desire to smear Labour’s NHS record, a strategy stubbornly hindered by both the facts and public opinion (see The Anatomy of a Lie: Cameron’s NHS Smear Campaign Exposed) it has become necessary for the Tories to trash the NHS itself.

This week, Jeremy Hunt told the House of Commons that ‘…cruelty became normal in our NHS…’

Even in responding to the shocking failures of Mid Staffordshire, such a deliberately perverse extrapolation by the Health Secretary is both regrettable and shameful. Cruelty never has, and never will be ‘normal’ in the NHS. Sadly, his carefully crafted smear should be seen for what it is – the continuation of Cameron’s methodical trashing of the NHS brand.

The Tories have been at it for months. Remember the Keogh Review? On the eve of publication Tory Central Office spun statistics to claim that 13,000 unnecessary hospital deaths had occurred under Labour. The Telegraph printed the allegations and Professor Sir Bruce Keogh responded to the spin by telling a complainant:

‘Not my calculations, not my views. Don’t believe everything you read, particularly in some newspapers.’

The publication of Professor Keogh’s report decimated the Tory NHS smear campaign:

‘Between 2000 and 2008, the NHS was rightly focused on rebuilding capacity and improving access after decades of neglect. The key issue was not whether people were dying in our hospitals avoidably, but that they were dying whilst waiting for treatment.’

It didn’t end there. The Professor took the ’13,000 excess deaths’ claim head on, calling it‘…clinically meaningless and academically reckless…’

The Telegraph claim prompted complaints to the PCC including one from the Cambridge Professor, David Spieghalter. The PCC told Professor Spieghalter that ‘…the Sunday Telegraph had published significantly misleading information…’

Writing in the BMJ, Professor Spieghalter gave a biting analysis of such reporting:

“It’s enough to make a statistician sob” he said, arguing that, in spite of repeated demolition “”13,000” threatens to become a “zombie statistic”.

The PCC didn’t publish its decision to call the Telegraph report ‘significantly misleading’ so the Mail can perhaps be forgiven for this week printing ‘Decade of Labour ‘saw 50,000 too many die in hospital’.

Just as with the Keogh review, this spin appeared on the eve of the government response to the Francis recommendations. The Tory smear machine took to twitter to spin the ’50,000’ deaths figure claiming that this had been ‘revealed’ by Professor Brian Jarman. Unfortunately for the hapless Tory tweeters, Professor Jarman responded to criticism that attributed these claims to him by tweeting that his figures didn’t relate to ‘unnecessary deaths’ and ‘I wouldn’t write those headlines’.

As the NHS prepares to face what many experts predict will be a particularly difficult winter period, Cameron should reflect on the crisis he has plunged the NHS into, stop trying to destroy the values and reputation of the country’s most valued public service and remember that he inherited one of the best health care systems in the world before his incompetent and expensive reorganization. The public wants to see the NHS protected and improved, not beaten to a pulp.

Most of all, his trashing of the NHS brand only undermines his own fragile reputation and fuels the re-toxification of the Tory brand; David Cameron truly is the political heir to Gerald Ratner.

Jamie Reed is Shadow Health Minister