NHS turns 75 and faces “worst crisis in its history” amid warnings from experts

Labour’s greatest achievement, the NHS, turns 75 today. Keir Starmer has released a video wishing the health service happy birthday, where he and Wes Streeting talk about their personal connections to the NHS. Streeting says the NHS is “going through the worst crisis in its history, but it has the potential to be great again”. 

The health of the health service is not only a cause of concern for the Shadow Health Secretary. The chief executives of three major think tanks working in the area– the Health Foundation, Nuffield Trust and The King’s Fund – are marking the day by writing to the Keir Starmer, Rishi Sunak and Ed Davey to warn that the NHS is in “critical condition”, continuing: “Pressures on services are extreme and public satisfaction is at its lowest since it first began to be tracked 40 years ago”.

Another think tank, the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, everyone’s favourite storage hangar for future Labour spads, has also seized on the anniversary. The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change has released a report titled “Fit for the Future”, which argues that we should forefront digital technology to change the way our health system runs, including introducing a “personal health account” for every individual and creating cloud infrastructure for the NHS. In the report’s foreword, the former Prime Minister writes that “we need a health service that changes fundamentally the relationship between the citizen and the service; one that is open to new providers and new partnerships that operate outside the system; one where the incentives of funding and accountability are designed to encourage innovation, particularly through the use of technology; and one in which the workforce is reshaped around what makes sense today, not the traditions of a health-care system from a bygone era”.

In non-NHS news, the results of Labour Students’ conference ballots have been released. In the grand tradition of Labour Students, it’s contentious. A potential motion “condemning the government’s higher education failure” received the most nominations, but it notably does not include any mention of free education or abolishing tuition fees. So far, so good for the Labour leadership, which the motion pledges to “wholeheartedly support” to boot the Tories out. One catch, LabourList understands, is that because the conference delegates were not weighted by clubs’ relative membership size, the vote is indicative rather than binding. A second catch is that the motion exceeds the word limit to be officially proposed to party conference.

National Labour Students chair Ben McGowan says he “will be respecting the democratic mandate this motion has” – but a third and final catch is that its committee voted to campaign to scrap fees following a vote in February, so it’s not clear if that still carries weight too. Socialist Future, the left slate on which the majority of committee members were elected, said: “It is vital that Labour Students takes a clear position to annual conference – anything else would be a wasted opportunity.”

In other education news, the National Education Union are out on strike today. They’ve also released a video where Faiza Shaheen, an economist and the Labour candidate for Chingford and Woodford Green, explains inflation and why the NEU want above-inflation pay rises. You can’t imagine the leader’s office will be all too pleased with the apparent endorsement of strikes and that demand by Shaheen, widely seen as one of only a handful of Labour left candidates selected under Starmer.

And, finally, at a hustings for the Uxbridge by-election last night, Labour candidate Danny Beales distanced himself from Sadiq Khan’s ultra low emissions zone (ULEZ) policy, saying that it was “not the right time” to expand the scheme to outer London. The scheme has proved extremely divisive (read: when I went canvassing in Uxbridge a few weeks ago a man yelled at our group in the street about it), and while City Hall probably won’t be delighted with Beales’s stance, I’m sure it will be being briefed out to the many campaigners flocking to Uxbridge before the by-election on the 20th before they hit the doorsteps.

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