David Cameron’s efforts to prove how much he loves the NHS reveal how little he understands it

This week I was tempted to write about the fact that UKIP have befriended a holocaust denier in the European Parliament. But I really can’t abide any more pictures of Farage’s ridiculous face haunting about my doors, and so I’m not. You can just contemplate the disappointment of that thought yourselves.

So let’s talk about something equally disheartening: PMQs – yes, the place where dignity goes to die. Fellow LabourList writer Maya Goodfellow ambivalently noted that Miliband had ‘landed a blow’ on Cameron about the NHS, which is good I guess, but to be honest I was so frustrated by the unfolding of the whole debate that, for me, neither leader came off smelling of roses.

PMQs is notoriously the arena in which politics is at its most farcical and least relevant, and the handling of the NHS issue was PMQs at its worst. For those of you lucky enough to have missed it, Cameron and Miliband squabbled over which party was the least-trusted on the NHS, based upon which regional NHS is worse: England or Wales. To prove that he loves the NHS the most, Cameron spent quite a lot of time talking about how awful it is – or specifically, how awful NHS Wales is.

My mum has been a nurse for NHS Wales for over 40 years. When she got married in 1980, she took time out of her wedding day to visit the hospital in her wedding dress to cheer up the patients. When I was 11, she asked all the children in my class to make get well soon cards for a teenage patient she had. When I was a teenager, I remember her picking primroses in our garden for a patient who was struggling to recover. These are the daily acts of compassion NHS staff in Wales carry out for their patients. I wonder whether Cameron considered how those staff would feel when he described the border between England and Wales as “the line between life and death”?

Only someone who has no understanding of the NHS would say something so crass. In attempting to demonstrate that he can be trusted on the NHS, Cameron revealed that he can’t be trusted at all – because he doesn’t understand what the NHS means to people working within it and to people who rely on it. Ultimately the NHS is about the principle of care on a human level, and that principle is upheld by its staff.

It is therefore not surprising that David Cameron blithely slashes NHS spending in Wales whilst simultaneously calling NHS Wales “second class.” It’s not surprising he isn’t celebrating NHS Wales staff as miracle workers for achieving such high satisfaction ratings in the face of decreasing funds. The NHS in Wales is not perfect, but its successes can be attributed to staff who go over and above the call of duty, despite the fact that they’ve got a Prime Minister who thinks nothing of standing up in parliament and implying their patients might be killed.

This is David Cameron’s grand argument that the Tories can be trusted on the NHS? What a joke.

Ellie Mae O’Hagan is the Media and Communications Officer at Class